Hezekiah University Journal of Management & Social Sciences

This paper, Comparative Analysis of Nominal Groups in English and Gokana Languages, adopts the descriptive approach and Contrastive Analysis (CA) as its theoretical framework. The study aims to analyze nominal groups in both languages English and Gokana. Data sources include primary and secondary sources, as well as from the researcher’s intuition as a native speaker of Gokana and a competent user of English as a second language (L2). Data analysis was carried out using morpheme-to-morpheme glossing and are presented in sentence forms. The findings reveal that all nouns in Gokana begin with consonants and exhibit CV, CVC, and CVCV syllable structures, whereas English nouns may begin with either vowels or consonants and display varying syllable structures. The study further shows that count nouns can be preceded by articles and pluralized in both languages. Additionally, the Gokana suffixes -i and -a function as proximal and distal demonstratives that change form in response to number contrasts, while Gokana demonstratives remain invariable. Gokana nouns do not show morphological contrast for number, as plurality is lexicalized. This study contributes to the linguistic description of Gokana and English, serving as a reference for the Gokana and Ogoni communities and as pedagogical material for teaching Gokana nominal groups.