GRAMMATICAL STRUCTURES IN NEWS BULLETINS: INSIGHTS FROM FULFULDE AND ENGLISH

Syntactic analysis, through which the structures can be observed and used to express different ideas, play a vital communication role. This research paper examined the variations in syntactic structures of Fulfulde and English news bulletins of Adamawa Broadcasting Corporation Yola. Three sentences were selected each from the news bulletins between the months of February and March, 2024, and were analyzed using Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG) theory of Chomsky (1957), and its revised version (1965), as a theoretical Framework. Results of the analysis indicate that, the Fulfulde past tense markers do not indicate only the tense, but also shows plurality in that same sentence. It also revealed that, modal auxiliary verbs are used in English sentence as an independent lexemes, while in Fulfulde sentences their equivalents operate as inflectional elements. Also observed that the word order of sentences of the two languages vary despite the fact that both the two languages are SVO (subject, verb, object languages). It was concluded that the variations in syntactic structures occurred in the areas of subject, verb and object of the sentences. The study recommends that, ESP practitioners should pay more attention to the analysis of variations in syntactic structure of languages, in material writing and production for the students of languages.