A CONTRASTIVE MORPHO-SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND ANGHAN LANGUAGES

Abstract

This study presents a contrastive morpho-syntactic analysis of English
and Anghan, a Plateau language spoken in southern Kaduna State,
Nigeria, for which, to the best of the knowledge of this research, no
documented grammatical description currently exists. Guided by
Distributed Morphology theory (Halle & Marantz, 1993), the
research employs a qualitative descriptive design with data drawn
from audio-recorded conversations, songs, folk stories, and
unpublished written materials, yielding one hundred and fifty
sentences for analysis. The Item-and-Arrangement approach and
Markedness Theory were applied to examine morphological
elements, combinatorial rules, syntactic structures, and the interface
between morphology and syntax in both languages. The findings
show that Anghan is a highly agglutinating, noun-centric language
with a systematic noun class system comprising at least ten classes,
each triggering obligatory agreement on verbs, adjectives and
pronouns, a feature entirely absent in English. Anghan exhibits
productive prefixation, infixation, and reduplication, with seven
distinct tenses marked through affixation, enabling mono-lexical
expression of complex sentences. While both languages share SVO
basic word order, Anghan consistently places modifiers after heads
(N-Adj, N-Poss), contrasting with English pre-nominal modification.
The study contributes to language documentation, provides empirical
support for theoretical claims about morphosyntactic variation, and
establishes a foundation for pedagogical material development and
language preservation efforts.