📄 English Verbs Their Use And Misuse by Iraqi Learners Of English Language

Summary

The paper looks at how Iraqi university learners of English handle English verbs, a known trouble spot for second-language learners. It first reviews the grammar of verbs as described in standard reference grammars: predicating vs linking verbs, transitive, intransitive and ergative verbs, finite vs non-finite forms, simple vs complex verb phrases, auxiliary placement, the difference between tense and time, and phrasal or prepositional verb idioms. It then discusses factors behind L2 difficulty, mainly learner age, motivation, L1 interference and the amount of input. The empirical part tests one hypothesis: younger morning-programme students use verbs better than older evening-programme students. Fifty randomly chosen fourth-year English majors (25 per group) answered a set of verb questions, and a t-test compared the groups. The morning group scored clearly higher. The author attributes the gap to age and to the shorter evening lectures. The paper does not describe the test items or the specific error types.

Key points

• Participants were fourth-year students of the English department, College of Arts, Al-Mustansiriyah University, in 2006. They were split evenly between the morning and evening programmes (25 each) and were all chosen at random.
• Mean scores were 2.8 for the morning group and 1.2 for the evening group, with reported variances of 0.9 and 0.7.
• The computed t was 6.41 against a critical value of 2.787, and the difference was declared significant at the 0.05 level in favour of the morning group.
• The grammar review splits complex verb phrases into four construction types: modal, perfective, progressive and passive.
• The explanations offered for the gap are learner age (citing Els et al. and Selinker & Lamendella) and reduced lecture time, meaning more limited L2 input, for evening students.

Interesting ideas

• I1. Ergative verbs like "open" let the affected entity appear as object in one clause ("I opened the door") and as subject in another ("the door opened"), so the syntactic subject does not always name the agent.
• I2. Word order can tell a particle from a preposition. "Saw the plan through" (persevered) and "saw through the plan" (detected the deception) mean different things, while "read the letter through/through the letter" do not.
• I3. Verb–particle combinations such as "pack one's job in" or "take someone off" (imitate) are non-compositional, and one combination can carry several idiomatic senses depending on its collocates.
• I4. The four complex verb-phrase types (modal, perfective, progressive, passive) combine in a fixed auxiliary order, as in "could have been running".
• I5. Grammatical tense is a language-specific device, while time is universal and independent of language, so the two should not be conflated.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

• I1 (frames): Role assignment should map the intransitive subject of verbs in ergative/causative-alternation classes to Patient/Theme, not Agent, so that "the door opened" yields an event with an unspecified causer.
• I2 (tree): The parser could use the "can the word move after the object?" test as a feature or repair rule to choose between compound:prt and a prepositional obl/case attachment.
• I3 (world): A compiled lexicon of phrasal verbs, keyed by verb+particle plus object type, should supply the frame meaning directly instead of composing it from "pack" and "in".
• I4 (tokens): Morphology or the tagger could decode an auxiliary chain into explicit features (modality, perfect, progressive, voice) by reading it left to right in this canonical order.
• I5 (world): The world model can store event time and ordering separately from the surface tense label, so that "will see" or a historical present still get the correct position on the timeline.