| Title: |
Locating Sources of Prepositional Redundancy in the Use of Transitive Verbs among Second Language Learners of English |
| Author(s): |
Basil Friday OVU |
| Abstract: |
The paper gives a generative explanation to the redundant use of prepositions in canonical non-prepositional verb contexts. With a total of 140 students drawn from the schools of Agric/Vocational Studies; Arts; Education; Natural Sciences and Social Sciences, Alvan Ikoku Federal College of Education, Owerri, the paper proposes logical and exploratory answers to what could be the cause of the redundancy in the students’ use of transitive verbs. The results of the descriptive statistics show that, although the 10 non-prepositional verbs used in the study form part of the students’ active vocabulary, a very large number of the students erroneously use the verbs with prepositions even where the contexts do not license them. Relying on some morphosyntactic evidence, the paper concludes by tracing the students’ problem to some representational impairment in their interlanguage which prevents them from setting the relevant PREP feature value that would assist them in correctly using the verbs in contexts. |
| Keywords: |
Nigerian English, non-prepositional verbs, minimalism, Spell Out, PREP feature, SLA, interlanguage
|
|
EBONYI JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE
