Negative and Interrogative Transformations in English and Tamorkhole Dialect of the Limbu Language: A Comparative Study

Abstract

The thesis entitled"Negative and Interrogative Transformations inEnglish and Tamorkhole Dialect of theLimbu Language: A ComparativeStudy" is an attempt to find out the processes of negative and interrogativetransformations in the Limbu language and to compare and contrast themwith those in English. This thesis is based on Tamorkhole dialect of theLibmu language. The data for this research have been collected from Sablakhu VillageDevelopment Committee of Taplejung district. The processes of negativeand interrogative transformations in the Limbu language have beendescribed and compared and contrasted them with those in English. It has been observed that there exists similarity in both the languagesin terms of thenegative marker in that both have overt negative markers(e.g. English hasnot whereasLimbuhasmeandn).However, there existdifferences in their distribution in larger constructions. Regarding thequestion formation, the English and Limbu languages show some analogy,since both the languages have overt question makers. However, they differgreatly in one respect: the question marker is placed at the beginning of thesentence in English whereas it is placed at the end of a verb (i.e. at the endof the sentence) in the Limbu language. Regarding open questions, there is adifference between these twolanguages. Whereas in English, along with thewh-word, some internal changes (such as subject-auxiliary inversion) occur,in Libmu simply placing wh-word after subject in various positions forms anopen question. This thesis consists of four chapters which are as follows: Chapter one deals with introduction. It includes general background;teaching of English in Nepal; languages of Nepal; theLimbu language; an viii introduction to contrastive analysis; importance of grammar; an overviewtransformation; anintroduction to negative and interrogative transformation;review of the related literature and objectives and significance of the study. Chapter two describes the methodology adopted for the study. Underthis chapter, sources of data, population, tools for data collection, process ofdata collection and limitations of the study are presented. Chapter three deals with analysis and interpretation of the data. In thissection, the rules of negative and interrogative transformation in theLimbulanguage are described; the process of negative and interrogativetransformationsintheLimbu language are compared with those in English. Chapter four presents the findings and recommendations of the study.Findings are derived from the analysis and interpretationof the data carriedout in chapter three. Recommendations are made on the basis of findings. The references and appendices form the concluding part of the thesis. ix