Syntactic Analysis of Mumuye Language

The paper is a syntactic analysis of Mumuye language, which is widely spoken in Taraba State. The objectives are to identify the sentence structure, syntactic category and phrasal form in Mumuye. It uses the descriptive design using qualitative method in analyzing the data collected through participant observations, oral interview and the intuition of the native speakers ensuring real sentence usage instruments. The findings reveal that Mumuye language like any other language exhibits Subject+Verb +Object structure (SVO) where the head-initial (determiner/article) comes after the subject of the sentence. The use of different phrasal type like noun, preposition, verbal and adverbial phrases are all noticeable in the sentence. It also revealed that all phrasal categories are discovered, with both lexical and functional categories. Mumuye also uses morphemes like prefix, infix and suffix in sentence formation in the language. Finally, the paper reveals that Mumuye uses declarative, imperative, existential, equational and question in their sentence formation. Imperative sentence can be represented in the other language while declarative, existential, equational and question sentences cannot be represented in the other language. It recommends that scholars, community-based researcher and native speaker collaborative efforts are required in comparative linguistic studies, curriculum development and native speaker’s engagement is needed for language development and preservation as well as further research in the other aspects of the language.