DEFECTIVE PAST TENSE MARKING: AN UNRESOLVED CONFLICT IN IGBO-ENGLISH BILINGUALS’ INTERLANGUAGE MORPHO-SYNTAX
Abstract
This study mainly focused on the defective marking of tense in modal and lexical combinations. The study findings showed that errors involving wrong marking of verbs for tense and to a large extent aspect are pervasive among L2 users of English. A total of ten data sets where used. The ten data sets were spread across four syntactic-pragmatic contexts, namely, declarative, interrogative, participial and small clauses. However, the errors were dominant in declarative clauses followed by interrogative while the rest had one data set each. The study concluded that more drills should be incorporated into the teaching of those aspects English syntax that pose serious challenge to the L2 users.
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