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Thesis (M. A. (Translation Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2006 / Refer to the document

The research examined the relationships between the morphological structures and features of Arabic and English verbs. An examination of the corpus in the research, which compiled 2000 verbs and their translation from various texts, showed that correlation between verb aspects are minimal. Therefore it is admissible to say that there is no correlation between morphological aspects and categories of Arabic and English verbs. Through analysis of Arabic verb patterns, the research demonstrated the primacy of a morpheme as one of the significant linguistic structural units that incorporates semantic and syntactic features, and also as a pivotal translation unit. The data analysis also signified that genre variation in Arabic is well established and can be clearly identified through morphological aspects of the verb and their distribution in text types. / Master of Arts (Hons)

The purpose of this analysis was to define norms for grammatical morpheme development in Spanish for Spanish-English bilingual children ages 4;0-7;6 relative to their use of Spanish. This study uses secondary data analysis based on two existing datasets. Participants included 334 Spanish-English bilingual children that were recruited from school districts in Texas, Utah, and Pennsylvania. Grammatical morpheme accuracy was determined by performance on the BESA (Bilingual English Spanish Assessment) (Peña, Gutiérrez-Clellen et al., in preparation). Percentage of current use of Spanish was estimated based on a parental interview in which parents estimated children language input and output. The average percent accuracy of grammatical morphemes was calculated and analyzed as a function of current use of Spanish and of chronological age. Results show that the percentage of accurately produced morphemes has a general upward trend as Spanish use and age increases. These findings will help define expectations for bilingual children that in turn can inform the development of intervention goals. / text

This study falls under the broad area of child language acquisition with specific focus on Shona morphosyntax. The understanding that knowledge of the nature of child language contributes to the sustainability of language acquisition matters forms the basis of the investigation. A qualitative approach is followed in the study, specifically focusing on the constraints on the development of inflectional morphemes (IMs) in the acquisition of nouns and verbs in child Shona. The study investigates the development of child Shona inflectional morphology and how morphology interacts with syntax. The constraints that operate in the acquisition of Shona are identified. The study refers to linguistic theories for an account of the development of child Shona morphosyntax. The study is based on the understanding that knowledge of the nature of child language contributes to the sustainability of language acquisition matters. The data used in this study is collected from four Shona speaking children. The ages of the children range from two years (2; 0) to three years and two months (3; 2). Two female and two male children participated in this study. The primary method of data collection used in this study is the naturalistic method, while elicitation is used to elicit plural formation. The results indicate that child Shona morphosyntax is characterized by omission of the various inflectional morphemes on nouns and verbs, while the lexical morphemes are retained. The child Shona IM is phonologically different from the adult Shona IM. This is because the children are constrained and hence use simplification strategies in order to try to be faithful to the input grammar. The noun and verb IMs are produced in the form of a reduced syllable, because the children dropped the consonant in the IM syllable and retained the vowel. The study reveals that the development of child Shona morphosyntax is based on pivotal constituencies of the sentence. These pivots are the nouns and verbs that are used by the children. The study identifies constraints that operate on the process of child Shona development as phonological, morphological, semantic, visibility and frequency constraints. The finding that is arrived at through this study is that syntax is in place before morphology. / African Languages / D. Litt. et Phil.

<p>Research has shown that children who have English as a first language acquire grammatical morphemes in a predictable order. Many researchers claim that second language learners also follow a predictable pattern when learning English grammatical morphemes regardless of their linguistic background, and that the same mechanisms are responsible for both first and second language acquisition.</p><p>The aim of this paper was to study Swedish students’ knowledge of English grammatical morphemes, and to compare their knowledge with that of second language learners from other countries as well as with that of first language learners.</p><p>The results show that Swedish students seem to acquire morphemes in a similar way to that of second language learners in general and that they make errors similar to those made by first language learners. For example, the copula was almost fully acquired, while the third person regular and irregular constituted a problem for the students. The most notable exception was the possessive ´s, which Swedish students seem to acquire at an early stage compared to other second language learners.</p>

Typically developing Spanish-English bilingual children's production of twelve grammatical morphemes was analyzed for accuracy and described as a function of their English mastery, as indexed by mean length of utterance (MLU). Results revealed positive trends in morpheme accuracy as MLU increased. Despite a large degree of between subject variability, the data demonstrated general patterns that were consistent with previous literature, namely that the rate and trajectory of morpheme acquisition differs from monolingual norms, and that particular morphemes are predictably more and less challenging for bilingual children to produce accurately. MLU "cut-points" were suggested based on functional breaks in accuracy for several morphemes. / text

The overarching goal of the dissertation is to illustrate the relevance of learner corpus research to the field of second language acquisition (SLA). The possibility that learner corpora can be useful in mainstream SLA research has a significant implication given that they have not been systematically explored in relation to SLA theories. The thesis contributes to building a methodological framework to utilize learner corpora beneficially to SLA and argues that learner corpus research contributes to other disciplines. This is achieved by a series of case studies that quantitatively analyze individual variation and the role of native language (L1) in second language (L2) development of English grammatical morphemes and explain the findings with existing SLA theories. The dissertation investigates the L2 development of morphemes based on two largescale learner corpora. It first reviews the literature and points out that the L2 acquisition order of English grammatical morphemes that has been believed universal in SLA research may, in fact, vary across the learners with different L1 backgrounds and that individual differences in morpheme studies have been relatively neglected in previous literature. The present research, thus, provides empirical evidence testing the universality of the order and the extent of individual differences. In the first study, the thesis investigates L1 influence on the L2 acquisition order of six English grammatical morphemes across seven L1 groups and five proficiency levels. Data drawn from approximately 12,000 essays from the Cambridge Learner Corpus establish clear L1 influence on this issue. The study also reveals that learners without the equivalent morpheme in L1 tend to achieve an accuracy level of below 90% with respect to the morpheme even at the highest proficiency level, and that morphemes requiring learners to learn to pay attention to the relevant distinctions in their acquisition show a stronger effect of L1 than those which only require new form-meaning mappings. The findings are interpreted under the framework of thinking-for-speaking proposed by Dan Slobin. Following the first study, the dissertation exploits EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCamDat) and analyzes the developmental patterns of morphemes, L1 influence on the patterns, and the extent to which individual variation is observed in the development. Based on approximately 140,000 essays written by 46,700 learners of 10 L1 groups across a wide range of proficiency levels, the study found that (i) certain developmental patterns of accuracy are observed irrespective of target morphemes, (ii) inverted U-shaped development is rare irrespective of morphemes, (iii) proficiency influences the within-learner developmental patterns of morphemes, (iv) the developmental patterns at least slightly vary depending on morphemes, and (v) significant individual variation is observed in absolute accuracy, the accuracy difference between morphemes, and the rate of development. The findings are interpreted with dynamic systems theory (DST), a theory of development that has recently been applied to SLA research. The thesis further examines whether any systematic relationship is observed between the developmental patterns of morphemes. Although DST expects that their development is interlinked, the study did not find any strong relationships between the developmental patterns. However, it revealed a weak supportive relationship in the developmental pattern between articles and plural -s. That is, within individual learners, when the accuracy of articles increases, the accuracy of plural -s tends to increase as well, and vice versa.

The main objective of the current study is to investigate L2 Japanese learners' ability to segment complex sentences from aural input. Elementary- and early-intermediate level L2 learners in general have not developed the ability to use syntactic cues to interpret the meaning of sentences they hear. In the case of Japanese, recognition of inflectional morphemes is crucial for the accurate segmentation of complex sentences, as they signal the end of each clause. However, recognition of inflectional morphemes was found to be challenging for low proficiency learners because they are often fused in natural speech; thus, they are low in salience. To assist L2 learners in finding meaningful chunks, namely clauses within a complex sentence, the current study attempted to focus their attention on inflectional morphemes in aural input. During the experiment, learners were asked to repeat complex sentences as accurately as possible. Half of the stimuli were accompanied by pictures that corresponded to the activities described in these complex sentences. The study hypothesized that visualized chunks would reduce L2 learners' cognitive load and enable them to pay closer attention to syntactic elements; thus, learners would reconstruct complex sentences better with the pictorial information support. It was also hypothesized that the ability to reconstruct elements that are low in salience would account for L2 learners' receptive proficiency. The results revealed that L2 learners' reconstruction of complex sentences improved significantly with the support of visualized chunks. However, it became evident that learners' reconstruction of an inflectional morpheme to which they had not been fully exposed in class did not improve with the pictorial support. Such a tendency was particularly obvious when the inflectional morpheme was located in a sentence internal position. Additionally, the study found that L2 learners' ability to reconstruct an inflectional morpheme declined when it was void of communicative value. In terms of receptive proficiency, the results indicate that L2 learners' ability to reconstruct syntactic elements that are low in salience is a reliable predictor of their receptive proficiency.

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