CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF THE USE OF PERSONAL AND REFLEXIVE PRONOUNS IN ENGLISH AND HAUSA

This research is concerned with a contrastive analysis of personal and reflexive pronouns in English and Hausa languages. Lack of sufficient knowledge linguistic studies between the pronouns of these two languages contributes to persistent errors in usage, which affects learners’ fluency and grammatical accuracy. Therefore, the aim of the research is to conduct a contrastive analysis of personal and reflexive pronouns in English and Hausa. The study adopted a qualitative descriptive design. Data were drawn from examples in both English and Hausa, supported by grammar books and scholarly works. The Binding Theory from Generative Grammar served as the theoretical framework, helping to explain how pronouns and reflexives relate to their referents in different sentence structures. From the analysis, the research found that while English and Hausa share the same grammatical purpose of pronouns, their forms, gender marking, and attachment styles differ. These differences are the main sources of difficulty for Hausa learners when learning English pronouns. The research concludes that English and Hausa pronoun systems are similar in function but different in structure. Both languages use pronouns to replace nouns and to show who performs or receives an action. However, Hausa has a more detailed system, with clear gender and number markings and the use of clitic forms attached to verbs or prepositions.