The research, entitled "A Contrastive Syntactic Study of the Sentence
Structures of English and Igala" was undertaken as a contribution
towards the development of contemporary Igala grammar. The work entailed
looking at various constructions in Igala against similar constructions
in English. The structural theory as employed by Quirk, Greenbaum,
Leech and Svartik (1985) was adopted as the theoretical framework. Using
data from recordings, native speakers intuition, informal conversation
and books written in Igala, the research findingshighlighted some
characteristics of the sentence structures in Igala that were peculiar
to the language including the noun preceding articles and adjectives
when the subject is a combination of both. For verbs, Igala lacks
morphological inflections as used in English. The past form of the
simple or habitual tense is formed by removing an auxiliary verb „a‟
instead of simply adding „d‟ or „ed‟ as done in English. The verb „be‟
as found in English with all its different forms does not exist in Igala
but replaced by verbs that perform other duties such as „de‟ and „che‟
the verb „fu‟ is use as auxiliary to express the verb „have‟ in all
situations. While English maintains a „svo‟ pattern, Igala has both
„svo‟ and „sov‟ structures. Also, in the „svo‟ sentence structures in
Igala, the direct object precedes the indirect but always connected by a
preposition „to‟ or „for‟ (ng). For compound sentence, it was
discovered that Igala uses different words on particles for the
conjunctions „and‟ (ngo, lango) and „but‟ (Muda, amaa) and for the
complex sentence structures the subordinators in Igala are fewer than
those of English as one can be used to express more than one different
subordinate clauses. In conclusion, the findings of the study
highlighted several areas of the organization of the utterances in the
language thus proving that Igala was capable of using a high degree of
complexities in the sentence structures to express complete ideas just
as in English and other languages.