COMPARATIVE STUDY OF COMPOUNDING IN ENGLISH AND TIV SERMONS

An over-all theory of morphology is made prominent with the various processes involved in the creation of new words for a language. One of those morphological processes of word formation is compounding, which is found to be a prominent source of word formation, and probably found in all languages of the word. It is a general and well-known fact that all languages of the world have their specific structures. It can be said that English and Tiv are two different languages with different linguistic origins and character condition, and even the rules of word formation makes the two languages naturally different. These structural dissimilarities usually create problems in the teaching and learning of English, which is the target language. Thus what prompted this work, therefore, is to study English and Tiv languages using a comparative method to establish how the Tiv language exhibits its compound system of word formation comparable with that of English. The study is modelled on the theory of structuralism with particular attention to the restrictive meaning associated with bloom field, with emphasis on the process of segmenting and classifying the physical features of utterances, such as compound words. This is supported by item-and-process, a lexeme-based theory that considers complex words to be a result of the operation of processes on similar words. The research was designed specifically on descriptive survey, aimed at collecting and describing data systematically, taking care of the features or facts about the given population. From a collection and analysis of sermons, it was confirmed that: There are challenging questions in the description of compounding as a morphological process; Compounds are formed in Tiv and English by combining two or more lexemes or words, and this depends, to some extent, on whether a group of any kind has been considered, or is considered to be a lexical item; Tiv and English have certain compounding features similar to each other; There are more of differentiating features of compounding between Tiv and English. Based on these findings, it is our conclusion that the differences would always create problems in an attempt to learn and make use of English as a second and foreign language of communication. It is recommended on the whole that certain measures should be taken by government, teachers, and all speakers of the concerned languages to ease whatever difficulties involved in defining, identifying, and making use of English and Tiv language structures, and compound words in particular.