A Morphological Study of Inflectional Features in English and Izọn

This paper examines and contrasts inflectional morphemes in English and Izọn languages. The research is based on Standard English and the Kolokuma dialect of Izọn. The Kolokuma dialect is adopted in this study because it is has assumed the status of a de facto standard variety since it is the variety used in the mass media, education and recognized nationally and internationally. Data on English are derived from standard textbooks written in English while data on Izọn are collected from natural socio-cultural speech events in Kolokuma and Opokuma communities Bayelsa State of Nigeria where the dialect is spoken. The theoretical framework of this paper is based principles and parameters of universal grammar within the general concept of contrastive linguistics. The study sought to understand how each of the languages under study encoded agreement and number by inflection. The study reveals that inflections in both English and Izọn are class-maintaining since there is no change of syntactic category of words to which affixes are attached. It further reveals that whereas the verb in English inflected to agree with the subject noun, the Izọn verb this morphological and indeed, morphosyntactic property of number and does not make singular/plural distinction. However, generally, nouns in both languages possess number morpheme and verbs possess tense morphemes.