| Abstract: |
This study investigates Senior Secondary School students’ ability to identify various forms of pleonasm in written English. . Pleonasm is the use of more words or parts of words than necessary within a context. The theoretical framework used in this study is Error Analysis, which is a technique for identifying, classifying and systematically interpreting the deviations from the established rules. Data were obtained from ten selected Senior Secondary Schools in Onitsha North L.G.A., Nigeria. A questionnaire which has 30 items on pleonasm was used as an instrument for data collection. The study adopted descriptive survey research design. The t-test statistics were used for analysis. Result shows that most students identified occurrences of syntactic and semantic pleonasms but could not do same for pleonastic use of foreign words, idiomatic expressions and acronyms. Finding further shows that there is no significant difference in the mean responses of male and that of female students. It is therefore recommended that secondary school students should be taught to keep abreast of local and international acronyms in the language, so as to avoid pleonasm. Good language/linguistic dictionaries, and thesaurus should be provided in school libraries. The right use of foreign words and acronyms, and idiomatic expressions should be properly taught in secondary schools so as to avoid pleonastic statements. |
EBONYI JOURNAL OF LANGUAGE
