Comparative Analysis Of Chinese And Yoruba Language Personal Pronouns

Personal pronouns in Africa’s Yoruba language and Chinese languages have a high usage rate. This thesis aims at helping Yoruba students studying Chinese language as well as their teachers in understanding the personal pronouns in both languages, their similarities and differences. The comparative analysis was carried out from the aspect of the individual languages’grammatical functions and their pragmatic meanings. This paper explores the similarities, differences as well as the possible reason for the discrepancies present in the two languages’personal pronouns. This thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter introduces the significance of the topic and the research status of both languages. A literature review on previous works done by experts and scholars whom are both within and outside China for the two aforementioned languages. The aspects they studied, thier contributions as well as the significance of their works. We also looked at in this section, is the research methodologies to be use in the paper.The second chapter, briefly researches the history and development of both Chinese and Yoruba language’s grammatical part of speech. However, the third chapter looked at the history of the Chinese personal pronouns, the changes they went through in the ancient Chinese structure. Old Chinese personal pronouns include:予、余、台、乃、汝etc; In the modern Chinese these personal pronouns went through series of changes. This chapter equally analyzes the modern Chinese personal pronouns, their classifications and grammatical functions.Chapter four briefly explains the Yoruba language’s personal pronouns, as well as their developmental history based on literary works earlier written. And also analyse the different categories of Personal Pronouns present in the Language.The fifth chapter, being the most important chapter, analyses the similarities and differences between the Personal Pronouns in the Chinese and Yoruba Language. The analysis would be done from two perspectives, i.e. grammatical functions and pragmatic meaning. This paper would First of all, identify the similarities between the two Languages and then their differences. After which, possible cause or causes of their contrasts would be analysed.