Subject-Verb Agreement in Wambule and English

Abstract

The present thesis entitled“Subject-Verb agreement System in Wambule and English”aimed to find out subject-verb agreement system in the Wambule language in terms of person and number, tense and aspect and gender. It aimed find out the similarities and differences between English and the Wambule language. To accomplish the stated objectives in this thesis, the researcher collected the primary data from thirty Wambule native speakers from the specified place using non-random purposive sampling procedure and consulted the secondary sources given the the reference section. The researcher interpreted the data and came to these major findings: Both types of verbs(intransitive and transitive) in the Wambule language. The agents inflect verbs/auxiliary verbs. Affixation varies according to the person, number and aspect that occurred in a sentence. On the other hand, gender does not affect this language. This language introduces lexically three pronouns like‘uŋ’, ‘un’and ‘aŋ’; but they function of eleven. The first person personal pronoun‘uŋ’functions of the first person singular, dual (inclusive and exclusive) and plural(inclusive and exclusive) numbers. The second person pronoun‘un’ functions of singular, dual and plural numbers. And the third person pronoun‘aŋ’functions of singular, dual and plural numbers. As the English language, theWambule language has twelve tense and four aspects.However, there isnominal distinction in gender like‘papa’for ‘father’ and‘mama’for ‘mother’,same pronoun‘aŋ’is used for both masculine and feminine gender. There is another findings of the Wambule language that is‘a’which always comes as a prefix to the inflected verbs/auxiliary verbs for negative. In case of the verbs/auxiliary verbs inflected by the first person dual and plural exclusive pronouns, negative marker‘a’comes between morphemes‘sa’ and ‘pu’ for negative. This research includes five chapters. The first chapter contains general background of the study, statement of the problem, objectives of the study,research questions, significance of the study, de-limitations of the study andoperational definition of the key terms.The second chapter deals with the related literature review such as linguistic scenario of Nepal, the English language in Nepal, subject-verb agreement system, subject-verb agreement system in English an introduction of the Wambule people and contrastive analysis: an overview and conceptual framework. The third chapter deals with the methods and procedures of the study. This chapter includes research design,population and sample, sampling procedure, data collection tools, data collection procedure and data analysis and interpretation procedure. Similarly,the fourth chapter deals with results and discussions of the collected data. The last chapter (chapter five) deals with the summary, conclusion and implications of the study.