Learning through Errors V

 

 

Misformation errors are characterized by the use of the wrong forms of English morphemes or structures. In the utterance, “The dog eated the chicken,” a past tense morpheme was misformed by the learner of English. The misformed structure usually results from the failure to observe the restrictions of existing structure or from the application of rules to contexts where they do not apply. The sentence, “The man who I saw him,” violates the limitation on subjects in structure with “who.” The utterance, “I made him to do it,” ignores co-occurrence restrictions associated with “make.” These misformations result from transfer because the learner is making use of a previously acquired rule in a new situation. Three types of misformation errors have been reported, they are archi-forms, alternating forms, and regularizations.

 

Archi-form errors are made when one member of a class of forms is selected to represent others in the class. When a learner selects just one of the English demonstrative adjectives (“this,” “that,” “these,” or “those”), as in “that dog” and “that dogs,” “that” is the archi-demonstrative adjective representing the entire class of demonstrative adjectives. In the production of a complex sentence, such as “I finish to watch TV,” or “She suggested him to go,” the use of the infinitive is an archi-form for the gerund and “that”-clause that are to be provided for grammatical utterances. The archi-forms are a kind of pidgin language and vary for different learners, but they are common characteristics of all stages of second language acquisition. Thus they are intralingual errors.

 

Alternating forms are free alternations of various members of a class with each other, as the learner’s vocabulary and grammar grow. Language learners draw on a greater variety of forms and produce a wider variety of misformation errors. Some English learners produce the misformed demonstratives as in “those dog” and “this cats.” In the production of verbs, the “-en” participle form may alternate with the past irregular, as in the sentences of “I seen her yesterday” and “He would have saw them.” These alternating forms are intralingual errors.

 

Regularization errors that fall under the misformation category are those in which a regular marker is used in place of an irregular one. The overextension of linguistic rules to exceptional items occurs after some facility with the language has been acquired. These regularizations are different from regularization errors under the addition category in which some grammatical markers are added, as a regular form marker is added to some irregular forms. Regularizations under the misformation category are a substitution of something incorrect for exceptional forms because the learner regularizes exceptional items by using rules for regular forms. English learners very often regularize and misform several inflections based on a fairly high degree of regularity in the surface structure of English. Grammatical rules, used creatively, are regularized and give rise to many inflectional errors, such as “hisself,” “falled,” and “gooses.” Regularization errors abound, especially in native and foreign language learning situations.

 

Adult learners of English make a great number of regularization errors in the comprehension of syntax because the pervasive principles governing the form and interpretation of more advanced and complex structures also have exceptions. For example, complement types in English have exceptions causing a lot of miscomprehensions even to adult learners. Exceptional verbs like “promise” and “ask” cause misinterpretations when they appear with reduced complements, for they are treated as if they are regular. The utterance “Don allowed Fred to stay” implies “Don allowed that Fred could stay.” However, the sentence “Don promised Fred to stay” is misinterpreted as “Don promised Fred that Fred would stay” instead of “Don promised Fred that Don would stay.” The utterance “The girl asks the boy what to paint” is misunderstood as “The girl asks the boy what he should paint” instead of “The girl asks the boy what she should paint.” The exceptional nature of the predicate leads to a different interpretation from a regular predicate that permits a typical interpretation. 

 

Adult learners’ miscomprehension errors are generally counted as intralingual errors because the overextension of regular rules to exceptional items occurs within the target language. But some regularizations under the misformation category are interlingual. The following sample of English speech elicited from a Korean college student illustrates misformed interlingual errors in her second language communication:

 

 

The fact that land is very cheap in inaccessible region has allowed to the capitalist man to invest money in this region and exploit mineral.

 

 

    The student was instructed to read a number of short texts in English and then asked to write the content of each text in his or her own words without referring to the texts. The plural “-s” is omitted in “region” and “mineral” perhaps because plurals are not meaningfully distinguished from singulars in common Korean speech. The phrase “has allowed to the capitalist man” seems to follow the Korean syntactic structure that needs some preposition between the predicate noun (direct object) and the objective complement. These instances of first language transfer describe the examples of fossilizable items in second language communication.              

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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