THE MORPHO-SYNTATIC STRUCTURES OF GERMAN AND YORÙBÁ COMPLEX VERBS

PARALLELS AND CONTRASTS

Abstract

The morpho-syntactic analysis of complex verbs structures in German and Yorùbá languages are the focal points of this article. Hence, German complex verbs found in Gunter Grass‘s Blechttromel and Yorùbá complex verbs found in Fagunwa’sIgbó Olódùmarè literary texts were the databases for this study. Secondly, the study identified the morpho-syntactic structures of the identified complex verbs in the two languages, thereby categorizing them with a view to pragmatically synthesizing, comparing and contrasting their contextual usage in the corpus. Furthermore, the theoretical framework adopted for this study is the Contrastive Analysis Theory of Robert Lado. The result shows that some of the complex verbs in both languages comprised of two or more constituents; while those with more than two constituents are in the minority. As a result of the composite nature of the verb-forms in the languages, coupled with other identified idiosyncracies, remarkable features of distinction noticeably distinguish the morphology and pragmatics of verb-forms in the two languages, especially when prepositional or nominal items are concatenated with verb-forms. Conclusively, therefore, it is opined that these factors are substantial and capable of instantiating areas of learning difficulties for Yorùbá learners of German and German learners of Yorùbá languages pedagogically.