A Study of the Structures of Bura and English Main Verbs

Abstract

This study analyzes the structures of the main verbs of Bura and English languages. The aim is to describe the structures and functions of verbs in Bura language. The Bura language is predominantly spoken by indigenes in Hawul, Kwaya-Kusar, Bayo and parts of Shani and Biu LGAs of Borno State. The study adopts the descriptive linguistic theory as the theoretical framework, and is modelled after Halliday‘s Systemic Grammar. The study reveals among other issues that, in Bura, tense change is mostly from the simple present to the simple past forms of the bases. In most cases, the tense in the past perfective level is same as the past. Also, some verbs have within the structure of their base a suffix which regulates the word to act as either present or past; few of them exhibit the feature of the morphological process – reduplication, and some derivational suffixes which function to regulate the tense of the verbs were also realized. Many Bura sentences have within their structures some form of verbs whose meaning can only be captured contextually. Some words (verbs) have homophonic sounds with nouns; consequently, the intended meaning is conceptualized by the difference in tonal patterns. Other issues unveiled include: The occurrence of the predicate before the subject of the sentence, also the verb forms are primarily main and auxiliary verbs. According