The role of Function Words to build syntactic knowledge in French-speaking children

The question of how children learn Function Words (FWs) is still a matter of debate among child language researchers. Are early multiword utterances based on lexically specific patterns or rather abstract grammatical relations? In this corpus study, we analyzed FWs having a highly predictable distribution in relation to Mean Length Utterance (MLU) an index of syntactic complexity in a large naturalistic sample of 315 monolingual French children aged 2 to 4 year-old. The data was annotated with a Part Of Speech Tagger (POS-T), belonging to computational tools from CHILDES. While eighteen FWs strongly correlated with MLU expressed either in word or in morpheme, stepwise regression analyses showed that subject pronouns predicted MLU. Factor analysis yielded a bifactor hierarchical model: The first factor loaded sixteen FWs among which eight had a strong developmental weight (third person singular verbs, subject pronouns, articles, auxiliary verbs, prepositions, modals, demonstrative pronouns and plural markers), whereas the second factor loaded complex FWs (possessive verbs and object pronouns). These findings challenge the lexicalist account and support the view that children learn grammatical forms as a complex system based on early instead of late structure building. Children may acquire FWs as combining words and build syntactic knowledge as a complex abstract system which is not innate but learned from multiple word input sentences context. Notably, FWs were found to predict syntactic development and sentence complexity. These results open up new perspectives for clinical assessment and intervention.

Stress Misassignment in the Pronunciation of English by Arabic-speaking Learners: Erratic Practice or Crosslinguistic Influence?

The role of L1 interference in English stress assignment produced by Arabic-speaking EFL learners has received little research attention. This study aims to investigate whether faulty stress assignment by Arab learners is arbitrary or systematic. It also attempts to discover a linkage, if any, between Arabic phonotactic rules of stress placement and stress misplacement in English by Saudi learners. 120 learners from Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University were randomly chosen from 3 different levels of English proficiency (lower-intermediate, upper-intermediate, advanced); they were asked to pronounce 72 stimulus words that covered all morpho-syllabic word structures that the learners often mispronounced. The recordings were analysed using WASP spectrogram software and also by two independent raters. Results strongly indicated that crosslinguistic influence may have caused the learners to consistently a) place the stress on a specific syllable in a word even when this word has multiple stress assignments with a difference in meaning, b) stress the second item in a compound noun instead of the first, c) place the stress on the penultimate syllable of most polysyllabic words, d) place the stress on the second syllable of contracted negative auxiliary verbs , and e) misplace stress irrespective of their level of English proficiency.

Stressed and Unstressed Forms as Recognized by Iraqi EFL Arab and Kurdish University Students

This study aims to investigate the Iraqi EFL Arab and Kurdish University students’ ability to recognize the stressed (full or strong) forms and the unstressed (reduced or weak) forms within connected speech of English. The material chosen includes six auxiliary verbs. The sample of the study is twenty Iraqi EFL Arab and Kurdish fourth year university students of both genders (males and females). The participants are from the University of Baghdad and the University of Duhok.

ERROR ANALYSIS OF USING AUXILIARY VERBS IN WRITING DESCRIPTIVE TEXT

Grammar is complexity in learning English it makes many students often commit errors in learning. Making errors in writing is one of the processes for learning English .The aim of this research was to describe the students’ errors and its causes in using auxiliary verbs in the sentences. In this research, the writer limited the discussion on the error made by the students in using auxiliary verbs. The design of this research was quantitative approach in a form of descriptive analysis (percentage) that included observation, collecting the data the researcher used test as the instrument. The writer conducted the research to 31 students in first semester of English Literature in academic 2021/2022. The data were analyzed by using error analysis method. The error types were classified based on linguistic category, especially surface strategy taxonomy. The writer classified the types of error into omission, addition, misformation, and misordering. Among those four types, the most frequency error was misformation that reached 102 errors or 61.44% . the other finding was the sources of error which are divided into three categories. Those are interlingual errors, intralingual errors, and communicative strategies. Communicative strategies errors is the most common source of error, there were 45.78%

Romance and Croatian in Contact: Non-Clitic Auxiliaries in Istro-Romanian

This paper focuses on Istro-Romanian and argues that the TAM auxiliaries of this variety are not morphophonological clitics. This analysis is supported by the existence of several empirical phenomena (auxiliary-licensed VP-ellipsis, scrambling, and interpolation), some not found in modern Romance, others very rare in modern Romance. This property of Istro-Romanian auxiliary verbs accounts, in conjunction with other features of this variety (e.g., the availability of C-oriented and I-oriented pronominal clitics), for the massive variation in the word order of pronominal clitics, auxiliaries, and the lexical verb found in the Istro-Romanian sentential core. An endangered Romance variety spoken in Istria and in the diaspora, historically related to (Daco-)Romanian, Istro-Romanian has been in contact with Croatian since the settlement of Istro-Romanians in the Istrian peninsula. As some of the Istro-Romanian features and phenomena are found both in Croatian and in old Romanian, it appears that contact with Croatian acts as a catalyst of structural convergence engendering the retention of an archaic property of Istro-Romanian auxiliaries: a lower position on the grammaticalization cline, closer to the full word status of their etyma.

The Use of Modal Auxiliary Verbs among Selected Pre-Service Students at A South African Rural University

This study was conducted at a university based in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. The purpose of the study was to determine if the explicit instruction of selected grammar aspect, modal auxiliary verbs, improved students’ ability to write English. The study was qualitative in nature and a case study design was adopted. The focus was in relation to a sample of 80 student teachers who were randomly selected in 2016 in the Faculty of Education. 40 participants were randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. For the experimental group, training lasted six weeks. Both groups were made to write similar essays and those essays were marked focusing on the students’ ability to use modal auxiliary verbs. The study’s findings revealed that the experimental group performed better than those in the control group in the use of modal auxiliary verbs. Based on the findings, the study recommended explicit grammar instruction in all the students’ level of study in order to overcome the challenges they have in writing English. Thus, time should be created to ascertain that adequate explicit grammar lessons are offered to all pre-service teachers at the university.