A Contrastive Study of the Comparative and Superlative Inflectional Morphemes of English and Yoruba Languages

Abstract

This paper analyses and contrasts the comparative and superlative inflectional morphemes of the English and Yoruba Languages with the aim of identifying the morphological and syntactic structural differences, which may pose some difficulties to the Yoruba learners of English as a second language. The study adopted the Contrastive Analysis (CA) theory as its theoretical framework as well as the qualitative descriptive design with a content analysis approach, while using a textual data collection method. The study revealed that while the English language uses the inflectional markers “-er” to mark the comparatives and “-est” to mark the superlatives of adjectives and adverbs; the Yoruba language on the other hand employs lexical items “-ju…lo” as comparative marker and “-julo” for the superlative marker through partial reduplication. The paper further discovered that while the inflectional morphemes of the English language are all suffixes, the Yoruba language lends itself to both, but majorly prefixation. However, the comparative and superlative markers of both English and Yoruba languages are suffixes. In addition, the English language in its grammatical rules contains some exceptions or irregularities, which may further pose some challenges to the second language learner. The study therefore recommends that second language learners, whose first language is Yoruba, should ensure proper learning and acquisition of the correct formation and usage of all the comparative and superlative markers of the English language, in order to improve their proficiency in the language.