Contrastive analysis of topicalization in English and Urhobo

Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 4.4, , language: English, abstract: This research is a contrastive analysis of topicalization in English and Urhobo. Urhobo is a Southwestern Edoid Nigerian language.

Its objective is to explore topicalization in English and Urhobo languages using the basic Chomsky's Phase theory model to establish points of divergence while noting convergence in the derivation of the investigated phenomenon to highlight areas of learner's difficulty which will be useful to teachers as best strategies in the teaching process.

The study uses two sources of data, namely primary and secondary sources. Through observation and textbook, internet and dictionaries, data was collected and analyzed. The theoretical framework adopted for the study is the Phase Theory. The data analysis posited that the theory is a suitable mechanism for the analysis of the investigated structure, lexical items are assigned to probes because of the features they must realize the goal and every syntactic operation is done in phases which is the only level of representation.

Before delving into the discussion of the above topic, it is pertinent to try to get clear in our minds the sense in which the word 'transformation' is used in this study, since different people have different notions of the term 'transformation'. The English language like any other language has rules of syntax. Many languages including English have a transformation that moves constituents, which are strings of one or more words that syntactically and semantically behave as a unit, from one part of the phrase structure to another. This means that some sequence of words in a particular sentence can occur in a different position in the same sentence