Macaulay Mowarin

• Professor at Delta State University

This paper analyses how Nigerian stand-up comedians utilize and manipulate aspects of the syntax of Nigerian Pidgin and other sociolinguistic features of the various languages in which they ply their act. The data, derived from recorded videos of five Nigerian stand-up comics, is analysed using M.A.K Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar and Myers...

This paper undertakes a contrastive inquiry into wh-interrogatives in English and Nigerian pidgin based mainly on Chomsky’s minimalist program of transformational grammar as the theoretical framework. It is a pedagogical approach to the study of Nigerian pidgin in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria where the language has creolised. The main objectiv...

This paper undertakes a contrastive inquiry into wh-interrogatives in English and Nigerian pidgin based mainly on Chomsky’s minimalist program of transformational grammar as the theoretical framework. It is a pedagogical approach to the study of Nigerian pidgin in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria where the language has creolised. The main objectiv...

p> This paper discusses bilingual verbs, which are intermediate forms that cannot be fully identified with neither Nigerian pidgin nor English, in Nigerian pidgin- English code mixed utterances. The process involved in the derivation of bilingual or hybrid verbs is analogous to hybrid forms in biology. The conceptual framework of this study is Myer...

This paper is a stylistic analysis of how Eghagha innovatively and creatively manipulates lexical items and engages in morphological innovations in order to foreground the themes of the adverse effect of socio-economic and political misrule by Nigerian rulers on the ordinary man in the Niger Delta region in particular and Nigeria in general. It foc...

This paper undertakes a contrastive analysis of determiners and adjectives in English and Nigerian Pidgin. It observes that there are sub-divisions of determiners; which are pre-determiners, determiners and post-determiners and it discusses the form class of determiners in English and Nigerian Pidgin. This paper notes that Nigerian Pidgin has fewer...

This paper looks into how inter-ethnic communication can be facilitated by the adoption of West African pidgins as the lingua franca in Anglophone West African countries. Although English is the official language in these countries, the language cannot be adopted as the language of wider communication because of the high level of illiteracy in thes...

This paper undertakes a contrastive linguistics of relativisation in English and Nigerian Pidgin. The three main objectives of this paper are as follows: first, it undertakes an overview of Nigerian Pidgin as a neo-African language; discusses the benefits of Chomsky's Minimalist program that is adopted as the grammatical model for this study and it...

This essay discusses the linguistic and cultural factor that has acted as impediments to Nigeria's breakthrough into the knowledge era. It identifies language deficit in English by most Nigerians, under-developed state of most Nigerian languages, absence of creative education and the presence of certain cultural taboos which stifles the flourishing...

This paper undertakes a detailed analysis of sentential negation in the English language with Chomsky's Government-Binding theory of Transformational Grammar as theoretical model. It distinguishes between constituent and sentential negation in English. The essay identifies the exact position of Negation phrase in an English clause structure. It obs...

This paper discusses the internal structure of the noun phrase in the Naija. The dominant role of the noun phrase in the Naija clause structure is imposing since the competent speaker of the language encounters it in the subject, object and compliment structures of the sentence. The subtypes of determiners which precede the 'head' of the noun phras...