Negative and Interrogative Transformations in the English and Koyee

Abstract

This study was conducted to find out the 'Negative and Interrogative Transformations in the English and Koyee'. The native speakers of the Koyee Rai language were primary sources of data for this thesis. The informants were divided into two groups: equal number of educated and uneducated persons. I used stratified random sampling procedure to sample the population. The interview and questionnaire were used as research tools for data collection. I have found mainly three negative markers, i.e. 'a-', 'ā-' and 'me?' in the Koyee language but English has many negative markers, i.e. 'no', not, no one/none, nobody, never, barely, hardly, rarely, scarely, seldom, neither....nor etc. Among them, not is attached as suffix in verb and other negative markers are isolate put before and after the verb. And to make questions in written form and spoken form are marked by only putting interrogative marks at the end of the sentence in the Koyee language. This thesis consists of four chapters. The first chapter deals with the introduction part of the study which consists of general background with several subtopics, namely, introduction to English and Koyee Ethnic Group and Koyee Rai language, an introduction to contrastive analysis, an overview of transformation theory, negative and interrogative transformations, review of related literature, objectives of the study, etc. The second chapter deals with the methodology which consists of the sources of data collection, sampling procedure and limitations. The third chapter deals with the analysis, interpretation, presentation and comparison of the data. The fourth chapter deals with the findings, recommendations and pedagogical implications of the study.