Grade 10 English First Additional Language Learners’ Strategies For Past Tense Irregular Verb Inflection Mastery

<p class="Default"><strong>Abstract.</strong><strong> </strong>The mastery of the irregular form of verbs in the past simple tense poses challenges to non-native learners of English all over the world. The objectives of this study were to identify the types of learners’ strategies useful for mastering the irregular verb inflection, to describe and evaluate them, and to establish why the English First Additional Language learners face difficulties in mastering those strategies. The study followed a quantitative research design. A questionnaire was used as an instrument for data collection from the respondents. Data were analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 22 to ensure valid interpretations. Subsequent themes were placed in a table and a graph dealing with the inflection of irregular verbs. The target group of this study comprised 21 Grade 10 learners who were attending Dimani Secondary School in Limpopo Province, South Africa during the academic year 2021. From the data analysis, the initial study findings established that the respondents were incompetent in mastering the inflection of irregular verbs in the past simple tense when using the suppletion principle and the terminal consonants phoneme changes. The researchers used the grouping of common irregular verbs and the learning of irregular verbs in sentences strategies because learners were different and learned irregular verb inflection differently. Although it was previously found that learners could not understand the inflection of irregular verbs in the past simple tense, after having utilised these two strategies, the inflection of irregular verbs in the past simple tense improved with tremendous results.</p><p class="Default"> </p><p>Keywords: Inflection; irregular verbs; past simple tense; strategies<em></em></p>

Input effects in the acquisition of verb inflection: Evidence from Emirati Arabic

This study investigates the acquisition of the Imperfective verb inflection paradigm in Emirati Arabic (EA), to determine whether the learning process is sensitive to the phonological and typological properties of the input. We collected data from 48 participants aged 2;7 to 5;9 years, using an elicited production paradigm. Input frequencies of inflectional contexts, verb types and tokens were obtained from corpora of child-directed and adult EA. Children's accuracy was inversely related to the input frequency of inflectional contexts, but not related to type and token frequency or phonological neighborhood density. Token frequency interacted with age, such that younger children performed considerably worse on low-frequency tokens, but older children performed equally well on high- and low-frequency tokens. We conclude that learning is input-driven, but that a sufficiently regular paradigm allows children to eventually generalise across all items earlier than in previously studied European languages.

Patterns of interpredictability and principal parts in Latin verb paradigms: an entropy-based approach

This paper provides a fully word-based, abstractive analysis of predictability in Latin verb paradigms. After reviewing previous traditional and theoretically grounded accounts of Latin verb inflection, a procedure is outlined where the uncertainty in guessing the content of paradigm cells given knowledge of one or more inflected wordforms is measured by means of the information-theoretic notions of unary and n-ary implicative entropy, respectively, in a quantitative approach that uses the type frequency of alternation patterns between wordforms as an estimate of their probability of application. Entropy computations are performed by using the Qumin toolkit on data taken from the inflected lexicon LatInfLexi. Unary entropy values are used to draw a mapping of the verbal paradigm in zones of full interpredictability, composed of cells that can be inferred from one another with no uncertainty. N-ary entropy values are used to extract categorical and near principal part sets, that allow to fill the rest of the paradigm with little or no uncertainty. Lastly, the issue of the impact of information on the derivational relatedness of lexemes on uncertainty in inflectional predictions is tackled, showing that adding a classification of verbs in derivational families allows for a relevant reduction of entropy, not only for derived verbs, but also for simple ones.

The system of processing verb inflection in Benson’s dictionary

From the perspective of the theory of lexicographic functions, this paper analyses in a metalexicographic manner the system of processing inflection data on the verbs of the Serbian language in M. Benson?s SerboCroatian-English Dictionary (BENSON 1993). The processing system is perceived through the prism of the needs of users whose native language is not Serbian in three situations: reception, production (which includes translation situations) and the situation in which the dictionary is used for gaining knowledge on verb inflection in the Serbian language. In the analysis of the dictionary, it has been noted that the processing system is made up of four lexicographic methods: 1) inflected forms of the verbs with a suppletive present base form and apophony in that base compared to the infinitive base form were included as headwords of particular dictionary entries with cross-references to the infinitive, but this was not done systematically and consistently; 2) as for the thematic verbs which are included in 36 separate accentual-conjugation types, type marks were provided with the verb, with cross-references to the introductory pages of the dictionary, where those marks were textually interpreted; 3) as for the thematic verbs which are not included in the aforementioned types, as well as all athematic verbs, inflection data were listed in the grammar section immediately after the headword; 4) for a smaller number of verbs, the model verb from which the inflection data should be analogically derived is listed in the dictionary entry itself. However, if a sound change in the present tense appears in verbs to which the third and fourth lexicographic method was applied, then a partial paradigm of the present tense in its full or shortened form was provided before the cross-reference to the typical verb in the form of a mark or a specific verb. The analysis showed that the first aforementioned lexicographic method meets the reception-related needs of the users of Benson?s dictionary. However, considering that it was not consistently applied, it does not satisfy those needs in all cases. The remaining three methods completely meet production-related needs, but it remains uncertain whether the applied methods are clear to the average user and, if so, to what extent. Therefore, the paper also offers a simplified version of Benson?s system of processing verb inflection, which would be more harmonized with the users? needs. However, Benson?s dictionary cannot serve as a handbook for gaining knowledge on verb inflection in the Serbian language, because the introductory pages and the grammatical appendix neither offer the rules on the formation of verb forms nor include complete paradigms of basic inflection types. The results of the analysis in the conclusion are applied to the draft of a new, proposed, French-Serbian dictionary, which additionally points to the advantages and shortcomings of applied lexicographic methods.

Demorphologization and deepening complexity in Murrinhpatha

Inflectional allomorphy is a prototypical form of morphological complexity, introducing unpredictability into the mapping of form to meaning. In this chapter, we examine a system of verb inflection allomorphy in the Murrinhpatha language of northern Australia, which shows a high level of complexity as measured by unpredictability of analogical relations in inflectional exponence. We argue that in this case the unpredictability is associated with incremental demorphologization, the process whereby morphology gradually dissolves into unanalysable lexical form. We present observations of analogical change in Murrinhpatha, comparing contemporary fieldwork documentation with data from forty years earlier, showing that a long-term process of demorphologization is still underway in recent generations, resulting in increasing complexity of the system.

The segmental and tonal structure of verb inflection in Babanki

In this study we provide a comprehensive phonological and morphological analysis of the complex tense-aspect-mood (TAM) system of Babanki, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon. Our emphasis is on the competing inflectional tonal melodies that are assigned to the verb stem. These melodies are determined not only by the multiple past and future tenses, perfective vs. progressive aspect, and indicative vs. imperative, subjunctive, and conditional moods, but also affirmative vs. negative and “conjoint” (CJ) vs. “disjoint” (DJ) verbal marking, which we show to be more thorough going than the better known cases in Eastern and Southern Bantu. The paper concludes with a ranking of the six assigned tonal melodies and fourteen appendices providing all of the relevant tonal paradigms.