A PSYCHOANALYSIS OF WORD – FORMATION PROCESSES IN ENGLISH AND HAUSA
ABSTRACT
. This work aims to serve as a reference material to subsequent studies in English and Hausa languages in their various components of linguistic structures. It would also provide a framework for the study and analysis of the word-formation processes in English and Hausa. The study would also add to the research findings and meta-theory in linguistics thus, contributing to the current trend of intellectualism from the point of view of language. The work also attempts to enumerate and compare some of the word-formation processes in English and Hausa, such as acronyms, affixation, alternation, backformation, blending, borrowing, clipping, coinage, compounding, and reduplication. A sample descriptive approach was employed in the analysis of the data collected for this research. Thus, the procedure followed is a synthesis of the analytical comparative model of Nida (1949) and the stages of linguistic analysis of Carl (1996). Therefore, some of the research findings are that English and Hausa use some processes to create some words; that affixation is one of the processes found in both English and Hausa; that some of the processes discussed here could be found in one and not in the other
language, etc. Finally, it contains brief conclusion.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1:1 CONCEPTUAL PREMISE
The work is an attempt to compare the word – formation processes in two languages: English and Hausa. This chapter, therefore, attempts an introduction of the work. Thus, it contains the background of the study, the nature of morpheme, the historical perspective of the Hausa language, the statement of the research problem, the aims of the study, the justification of the study and the scope of the study.
The twentieth century is very important in the history of linguistics. This is because many linguistic theories came to the lime-light and many linguists initiated many theories in different fields of linguistics, which are morphology, syntax, semantics and phonology. For instance, it was at this period that in morphology the different approaches to identify morphemes and the relationship between morphemes and words were made manifest. The free encyclopedia (2008) is of the view that words are generally accepted as being the smallest units of syntax. It is clear that in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. For example, English speakers recognize that the words dog, dogs and dog-catcher are closely related. English speakers recognize these relations from their tacit knowledge of the rules of word-formation in English. They sense that dog is to dog-catcher as dish is to dishwasher. The rules understood by the speakers reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the
way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages, and formulates rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages. This work, therefore, is an attempt to compare the word-formation processes in two languages: English and
Hausa.
1.2 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY
The major task of a linguist is to describe the properties of a language. This kind of description is generally referred to as the grammar of the language.
Although there are some considerable disagreements within linguistics concerning the precise form of a grammar, it is believed that each grammar of a language has the following properties:
(a) Phonetic property
(b) Phonological property
(c) Syntactic property
(d) Semantic property
(e) Lexical or morphological property
The study of how languages are differently structured began out of the interest to classify language families across the world. This was initiated by historical or comparative linguists whose efforts were geared towards demonstrating similarities. However, comparative studies have shown that languages may share resemblances without being genetically related. According to Al-Hassan (1998: 11), comparative linguistics approaches languages through the different hierarchies of linguistic analysis, i.e. phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Among these levels of analysis, morphology has been accorded
rather secondary status in comparative linguistics. This research work sets out to study the similarities and/or differences of two genetically unrelated languages, namely (English and Hausa).
To compare two languages, for instance, phonologically, one could be expected to look at the phonemic inventories of the two languages, their phonotactics and/or the syllable structures, including their suprasegmentals.
Languages can be compared morphologically by looking at their systems of affixation and the nature of the affixes themselves, that is, whether the languages employ prefixes and suffixes only or even infixes and circumfixes and to what extent.
Genetically, the English and Hausa languages belong to different phyla; English is a European language in the Indo-European sub-division, whereas Hausa is a language in the West African sub-region. Generally speaking, irrespective of the genetic unrelatedness between any two languages, the languages must have certain similarities. The morphological features these languages may share in common may not necessarily be indicative of their genetic/historical relationship but a relationship, of universal dimension. It is
obvious that universal features among languages can only be discovered with exactitude through comparative/contrastive studies.
