A Comparative Syntactic Analysis of Focus Construction: A Case Study of Igbo and Yoruba Languages

Abstract

Every language in the world has peculiar features. It is the non-features of a particular language that account for the differences in language. What each individual language does is to choose its specific parameters from the principles that universal grammar (UG) has presented. Hence, focus construction is one of the principles which all languages have in common. But the parametric dimension varies from one language to another. This research paper is a comparative analysis of focus construction of Igbo and Yoruba language sentences with the view of finding out their uniformities and divergences in the area of derivations, positions, markers and their features.

Keywords: focus construction; focus marker, complementizer, structural positions, Government and Binding Theory, Trace movement principle, subjacency conditions, extracting site and landing site, resumptive pronoun