Aspects of the Syntax of Modification of Open Class Items in English and Anaang Languages: A Creative Analysis

This work focuses attention on Aspects of the Syntax of Modification of Open Class Elements in English and Anaang carried out from the view point of Creative Analysis. It discusses the syntactic issues and tries to account for possible difficulties and departures arising from dissimilarities or want of correspondences where such element is markedly absent in Anaang. The purpose was to establish a relationship between the modification systems of the open class items of English and Anaang languages. To achieve this purpose, one hundred Anaang speakers of English from the eight major local government areas where Anaang is spoken in Akwa Ibom State were selected by a stratified random sampling technique and studied. Thirty of the informants were from secondary schools, ten from Akwa Ibom State Polytechnic, Ikot Osurua, ten from Akwa Ibom State College of Educaton, Afaha Nsit, twenty each from the University of Uyo, Uyo and Akwa Ibom State University, Ikot Akpaden and ten from Akwa Ibom State Civil Service, Uyo. These respondents were required to write freely on a given essay topic which ranged from narrative, descriptive, expository and argumentative. The essays were analysed on the rank scale of syntactic structures of the English language. The results show that most subjects have little or no difficulty in identifying nouns, verbs, adverbs and adjectives modifiers in the two languages except in few instances. The study therefore, shows some similarities as well as differences, one of which is because Anaang language is an agglutinating language while English is not. It was concluded that their good performance in the modification of the open class items especially in Anaang language is expected and is of course unavoidable since they are Anaang speakers.

Keywords: Syntax of Modification Anaang Languages Pattern Modification Akwa Ibom State

Authors

• Utin, Iniobong Dominic
  Department of English, Akwa Ibom State University
  iniobongutin@aksu.edu.ng
• Isonguyo Akpan
  Department of English, Akwa Ibom State University
  akpanisonguyo34@gmail.com