A Morpho-Syntactic Study of The Acquisition of Participle Forms of Verb Among Yoruba-English Speaking Primary School Pupils

Abstract

This research work studied the acquisition of participle forms of verb by selected nursery and primary school pupils in Ekiti State Nigeria. The study was set out to find out how Yoruba ESL pupils show variability in their realization of inflectional morphology of English verb participle forms and to explain how the morphosyntactic features of the L1 and L2 interact to affect the learners’ acquisition of English participle inflectional morphemes. One hundred (100) pupils were selected at random from five public primary schools. It was revealed from the findings that pupils have little know of participle form of verb inflections. Findings show that of all the verb inflections of participle form by pupils, 0nly 37% was correctly used and 63% was misused. Out of the 63% misused, 31% was a misuse of –ing form, 6% was a misuse of –ed form and 26% was a misuse of –en form. Pupils mostly overgeneralized rules of regular verbs for irregular verbs. From the research data, pupils misuse past –ed for –en and –en for –ed. The findings revealed that the pupils often exhibit variability with respect to the realization of verb-participle inflectional morphemes by either making wrong substitution of a particular kind of inflection for another or omitting inflections outrightly.