The constant exploration and exploitation of crude oil in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria had had a negative consequential effect on the entire ecosystem of the region. This has been a source of national and international concern and has attracted the attention of scholars from several disciplines, within and outside the region. Creative writers were not left out and this had given birth to which poetry was one of its most prolific genres. Though regional, the literature in general and poetry, in particular, had attracted myriads of attention from eco-literary criticism while the language of the poems had been understudied. Therefore, this study is a linguistic analysis of Niger Delta environmental poetry. Seven poems were purposefully selected from Tanure Ojaide’s Songs of Myself: Quartet (2015) and Nnimo Bassey’s We Thought It Was Oil but It Was Blood (2002).  The Hallidayan Transitivity system of the Experiential meaning of the clause was adopted as a linguistic framework to show how the ecological realities of the region were encoded in the structure of the clause. The study revealed that the nature of the processes and the participants’ roles aptly encoded ecological degradation in the structure of the clause.

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This paper is a contrastive study of Sentential Negation in English and Izon languages. Contact language situations have given rise not only to the influences of one language over the other but also to the differences between the structures of the two languages in contact and the likely learning difficulties which an L1 learner of a second language may likely encounter in learning the structure of the L2. Thus, the data for this study were sourced from competent native speakers of the Ogbe-Ijo dialect of the Izon language and a contrastive approach was adopted using the Chomskyan’s Government and Binding theory as a theoretical framework with a view to identifying the structural variations, hierarchy of difficulties and the likely learning problems an Izon learner of English as a second language may encounter at the level of Negation.  It discovers that there were obvious parametric variations between the English and Izon languages at the levels of do insertion and the negative particle not among others. It then recommends that conscious efforts should be made by teachers and Izon learners / speakers of English as a second language at the level of realisation of negation in English as a second language.

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