A contrastive morphological analysis of tense formation in Igbo and Yoruba: implication on learners and teachers

This paper is a contrastive morphological study of tenses in the Igbo and Yoruba languages. It is limited to tenses only excluding aspects. It intends to aid speakers of the two languages in their effort to learn another’s language. This is considered vital since the two languages are among the major languages in Nigeria and people have become interested in learning them. Globalization has also necessitated the transfer of technological information into these languages, thus making this paper an invaluable one. Data for the two languages are collected from the primary and secondary sources in addition to the researchers’ intuitive knowledge of the languages. Data are analyzed using a contrastive analysis approach. Our findings show that there are differences in the processes of forming tenses in both languages. For instance, Igbo has indicative suffix –rV which may be deleted or optionally used with certain verbs in the present, and obligatorily used for verbs in the past, but in Yoruba, the present tense and past tense are unmarked. A hyphen is written between the future morpheme and the verb in Igbo, but Yoruba has a separate free morpheme to express the future. Also, in Igbo the 1st person singular pronoun and the 3rd person plural pronoun can come after the future morpheme –ga which is prefixed with a followed by the prefixed verbroot, but in Yoruba all the subject pronouns come before the future morpheme. These areas of differences are predicted by contrastive analysis as constituting learning difficulties. This paper proffers solution to the perceived tense problem by advocating that teachers should be more attentive to their students’ speeches and write-ups in order to immediately correct any error that might occur. They should avail themselves of the available materials on contrastive analysis such as this and guide the students to know the formation of tenses in these languages and immediately correct any error that might occur or better prevent the errors from manifesting.