Contrastive Analysis of the Morphemes of Yoruba and Igbo Languages

Abstract

Languages worldwide all have words used to convey meaning, which possess specific forms and structures. This article analyses and contrasts the morphemes of Yoruba and Igbo languages. A theoretical foundation for this study was developed on the concepts of contrastive analysis proposed by Lado. Since this research compares and contrasts the morphemes of Igbo and Yoruba languages, contrastive data analysis was used to analyse the data. The various rules and processes of forming words via morphemes were identified and classified for contrastive studies. The researchers used the marching approach of contrastive analysis. All word-formation processes are discovered to be typically rule-governed; however, these rules can occasionally be highly complex, and certain processes overlap and interact with one another. Findings from the study show that both languages exhibit general borrowing patterns, affixation, and compounding patterns. Prefixes are used in both languages to create words using morphemes; compounding is an effective technique in both Igbo and Yoruba languages. All compounds in Igbo and Yoruba languages are semantically endocentric; while Yoruba offers a flexible word order kind of compounding, Igbo uses a fixed order of words.