A Study on Subject-Verb Agreement in Bhujel and English Languages

Abstract

This study is about a study on subject-verb agreement in Bhujel and English languages. It is an attempt to identify subject-verb agreement system of Bhujel language in terms of person and number, gender, tense and its aspects. It aims to find out the similarities and differences between Bhujel and English languages. To accomplish the stated objectives, I collected the primary data from forty-five Bhujel native speakers from the specified place through purposive non-random sampling procedure and consulted the secondary sources mentioned in the reference section. I administered questionnaire as a tool to elicit the data. I interpreted the data and came to these major findings; Bhujel language follows SOV pattern whereas English follows SVO pattern in simple sentence. The agent inflects the verb in Bhujel language; person and number indices to the verb in Bhujel language but not in English. Affixation varies according to the person, number and aspect that occurred in a sentence. Bhujel language deals with past and non-past; it does not have future tense as in English. It has perfective and imperfective aspects; each aspect have distinct subject-verb agreement system. Both language are similar in terms of gender; it results that gender does not inflect the verb. Rest of the variables are structurally different and learners might commit several errors while learning English. This thesis has been categorized into five chapters. The first chapter deals with introduction which consists background of study, statement of the problem, objective of the study, research questions, and rationale of the study, delimitation of the study and operational definitions of the key terms. The Second chapter incorporates review of related literature and conceptual framework which includes theoretical review, empirical review, implications of the review for this study and conceptual framework. The third chapter includes methods and procedure of the study. Fourth chapter contains result and discussion. Likewise, fifth chapter presents conclusion and recommendations.