دور المعرفة الصرفية في اللغة الثانية في الاستدلال المعجمي للطلاب المعلمين السعوديين (باللغة الإنجليزية)

Abstract

Morphology is the study of the internal structure of words. A vigorous ongoing debate surrounds the question of how such internal structure is best accounted for: by means of lexical entries and deterministic symbolic rules, or by means of probabilistic sub symbolic networks implicitly coding structural similarities in connection weights. Information Retrieval has generally not paid much attention to word structure, other than to account for some of the variability in word forms via the use of stemmers. Further, words are the fundamental units of natural language, lying at the intersection of form and meaning. While there are significant generalizations within the lexicons of natural languages, such as the regular inflection rules of English, much lexical knowledge is idiosyncratically related to individual word forms. This study will describe an experiment to determine the importance of morphology, and the effect that it has on lexical inference. Also there will be a description of the role of morphological analysis in word sense disambiguation. The study aimed at determining the role of inflectional morphology in lexical inference, the role of derivational morphology in lexical inference, and measuring the effectiveness of a suggested program for developing lexical inference of Saudi student-teachers studying English as a foreign language. The study is a quasi-experimental as it is based on the quasi- experimental methodology: the researcher selected 64 student- teachers (32 males and 32 females) who are studying English as a foreign language as a study sample. The researcher rejected those whose age exceeds the natural rate which is between 20 and 21 years old. The tools of the study consists of (1) a program which consists of different kinds of morphology; especially, inflection and derivation to determine their role in lexical inference; and (2) a pre-post test in lexical inference. The tools are administered and the data was treated statistically and results indicated that derivational morphology has a greater influence on lexical inference than inflectional morphology. Also the effectiveness of the suggested program in developing lexical inference of the Saudi student-teachers was indicated. The study recommended that there should be programs for training student-teachers to lexical inference by derivation. Also it recommends that university courses and lectures should focus on derivation in order to help them in lexical inference.