The Markedness in Acquiring Do-support in Negation and Inversion by Adult Native-Arabic Speakers Learning English

Elham Salem Al-Makatrah,Mohammad Irshaid Al-Khawaldeh,Mohamad Subakir Mohd Yasin,Md Nasir Sulaiman

doi:10.17576/3l-2017-2304-11

Elham Salem Al-Makatrah, Mohammad Irshaid Al-Khawaldeh + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.17576/3l-2017-2304-11

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Abstract

The purpose of this study is to determine whether the markedness phenomenon of Do-support as a specific-language property poses greater difficulties for adult Arabic-speaking learners thereby bringing about more L1 transfer than the auxiliary verbs BE and HAVE. Do-support in the inter-language of adult native-Arabic speakers learning English was insufficiently addressed despite the complexity and that Arabic lacks do-support in negation and inversion. This study was conducted to address this gap within the theoretical framework of Differential Markedness Hypothesis (DMH). A sample of 100 Jordanian students attending Mutah University participated in the study where data was collected using a Multiple-Choice Task (MCT), and a Written Production Task (WPT), involving semi-structured interviews with 30 students from the student sample. The study used descriptive and inferential statistics to analyse the data where the findings showed a committed relationship between the auxiliary type and degree of difficulty that learners in both groups experienced with DO, BE and HAVE. Notably, Do-support poses greater difficulty compared to BE and HAVE where its usage is problematic particularly for beginners, resulting in more incidences of the Arabic influence. The data from the interviews support the results of the two tasks: learners find L2 marked features more difficult than L2 features, which are universal and genuinely part of the syntactic structure. The findings in this study will contribute towards a better understanding of how to develop an improved teaching process to more effective on the markedness and difficulty of Do-support compared to BE and HAVE. Keywords: Arabic L1 influence; auxiliary verbs; do-support; Differential Markedness Hypothesis

Highlights

Do-support is a particular phenomenon used in the English language where a periphrastic dummy auxiliary DO is used in certain clause types, exemplifying functional category features of number, person and tense (Ecay 2015)
Beginner Learners showed like performance for negation with BE and HAVE (96 % and 90.4 %, respectively) for Written Production Task (WPT), but performance fell visibly for Multiple-Choice Task (MCT) (81.2 % and 79.6 %, respectively)
The opposite for both tasks is evident in do-support, given that performance is not native-like, increasing to 46.4 % for MCT and reducing to 24 % for WPT

Summary

Introduction

Do-support is a particular phenomenon used in the English language where a periphrastic dummy auxiliary DO is used in certain clause types, exemplifying functional category features of number, person and tense (Ecay 2015). In modern English language, the main ‘verb’ remains in its primary base position within the VP (verb phrase), appearing to the right of elements like negation, and that is placed at the left edge of the VP. DO, BE and HAVE belong with modals from the category of [+ Aux] that appears to the left of the negative particle found in the English language and inverts with the subject in question formation. English auxiliaries are closely connected with finiteness, tense, and agreement, but carry little semantic content as with most functional categories found in English. DO “is always tensed (*to do like dogs)” and can be applied regardless of the “verb valency or event type” (Bohnacker 2013, p. 4)

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