The Acquisition and Use of the -S Plural Morpheme by Third-Year Students of English in a Nigerian University

Roseline Abonego Adejare

doi:10.4236/ojml.2019.96034

Abstract

This study examined the acquisition and use of the -S plural morpheme by third-year English undergraduates neglected in previous studies involving advanced L2 learners. It aimed at identifying all accurate and inaccurate instantiations of the form, determining their frequency of occurrence, specifying the context of occurrence of each plural bearing or non-bearing common noun, accounting for errors, and suggesting ways of improving L2 learners’ acquisition and use of the English -S plural morpheme. The data comprised 1219 common nouns generated from essays written by 15 volunteer English Education students at the Lagos State University, Nigeria. The Combined CA-EA-IL theory which argues that neither CA nor EA nor IL is sufficiently powerful on its own to account for L2 acquisition guided the study, while syntactic and textual parameters aided the analysis. Findings showed that 93 percent (1132) of the data represent correct usage and 7.14 percent (87) represent incorrect usage. Non-suppliance of the -S plural morpheme in non-obligatory contexts accounted for 74.2 percent (905), while its suppliance in obligatory contexts, non-suppliance in obligatory contexts, and suppliance in non-obligatory contexts respectively represent 18.6 (227), 6.1 (73) and 1.1 (14) percent of the data. Precisely 40 percent of the participants committed 74 percent of the errors, with 43 percent of the non-suppliance-in-obligatory- contexts errors occurring among clausal elements semantically indicating plurality. This implies that successful learning still eluded some learners despite the high level of exposure they got. Evidence of poor learning, ignorance of rules, over-generalisation, and inconsistency abound but only one incontestably L1-influenced error occurred.

Highlights

The English -S plural morpheme is one of the most difficult grammatical morphemes to acquire and use by L2 learners (Behjat & Sadighi, 2011), and there is a paucity of studies in its acquisition and use (Feng, 2012), compared to studies of verbal inflection (Haznedar, 2003) and grammatical morphemes in general (Akande, 2003)
This study examined the acquisition and use of the -S plural morpheme by third-year English undergraduates neglected in previous studies involving advanced L2 learners
The data comprised 1219 common nouns generated from essays written by 15 volunteer English Education students at the Lagos State University, Nigeria

Summary

Introduction

The English -S plural morpheme is one of the most difficult grammatical morphemes to acquire and use by L2 learners (Behjat & Sadighi, 2011), and there is a paucity of studies in its acquisition and use (Feng, 2012), compared to studies of verbal inflection (Haznedar, 2003) and grammatical morphemes in general (Akande, 2003). Third-year students of English have acquired skills and knowledge that are technically unavailable to the average participant in previous morpheme studies: They have taken and passed courses in English Morphology, the English Nominal Group, and English Phonology (segments). After such diverse and extensive exposure to the grammar and phonology of the -S plural morpheme, it is assumed that errors associated with its use will not occur and that whatever errors still manifest must be fundamentally ontological and should be accounted for differently and in more radical ways

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion