Structural Variations of Adjective in English and Okpameri

Abstract

Adjectives indicate grammatical property of language. They give more information about nouns. The usage of adjective in utterances varies in languages. These variations often pose problem to ESL learners. Predicating on Contrastive Analysis, the study generated Okpameri data from oral sources and participatory observation. English data were got from the English grammar texts. From the findings, the two languages are grammatically marked for pre/post modifying adjective, predicative adjective, degree of adjective and order of adjective. However, the grammatical structure and usage of these adjectives differ. While English adjectives often pre-modify the headword, Okpameri adjectives usually post-modify the headword. Also, while English distinguishes between the use of “beautiful” and handsome for feminine and masculine genders respectively, Okpameri language resorts to using uni-gender “shemilushe” which its equivalent translation in English is either “beautiful or handsome”. As in the case of degree of adjective, suffixes are attached to the root-word to form comparative and superlative adjectives of the two languages. It has been observed that English adjectival pre-modification is consistent. However, Okpameri adjectives function as pre/post-modifiers. The study, therefore suggests that language teachers, particularly English language experts, should adopt systematic approach to the teaching of adjectives as this will broaden the knowledge of Okpameri ESL learners.