Elamur Research⌕
☰
home / papers / 2014 / Assessing the so called Marked Inflectional Features of the Nigerian English: a Second Language Acquisition Theory Account

Assessing the so called Marked Inflectional Features of the Nigerian English: a Second Language Acquisition Theory Account

Paper · 2014 · Boluwaji Oshodi

Summary

The paper asks whether inconsistent verb inflection in Nigerian English shows a distinct variety or ordinary second-language learning. Kirkpatrick (2011) listed the dropping or misuse of -s, -ed, -ing and -en as marked features of Nigerian English. Oshodi tests that claim with a cross-population comparison. Undergraduates at Nigerian universities (L1 Yorùbá) and Malaysian universities (L1 Malay) completed oral and written composition tasks. Neither L1 inflects verbs for tense or marks subject–verb agreement.

The analysis draws on the Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH). This theory says L2 speakers have the underlying grammatical features but sometimes fail to retrieve the matching surface morphemes. Both groups dropped and misused inflections in much the same obligatory contexts. They also supplied the forms correctly elsewhere. The author therefore concludes the pattern is shared interlanguage behaviour, not a property of Nigerian English. This matters for the debate over whether new L2 Englishes count as varieties. The author notes that other grammatical areas still need examination.

Key points

  • The claim under test is Kirkpatrick (2011): omission or misuse of -s (3rd singular), -ed (past), -ing (continuous) and -en (past participle) marks Nigerian English.
  • Participants were undergraduates in Nigeria (Yorùbá L1) and Malaysia (Malay L1). Data came from oral and written composition tasks.
  • Yorùbá and Malay leave the verb (lọ / pergi, "go") unchanged across tenses. Yorùbá uses preverbal particles for continuous and future, and Malay uses akan for future. Neither has subject–verb agreement.
  • The error pattern was directional, as MSIH predicts. Present forms (including bare forms without -s) appeared in past contexts, but past forms never appeared in present contexts.
  • Learners sometimes supplied an inflection correctly and elsewhere omitted it in a similar context. This variability is read as a retrieval and mapping problem, not missing knowledge.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. To test whether a pattern belongs to one group, compare it with a different group that shares the suspected cause (here, an L1 without tense inflection). If the pattern appears there too, it is not group-specific.
  • I2. Variable suppliance of the same morpheme in similar contexts shows the grammar is present and the surface form simply failed to appear. Treating such text as a noisy surface of standard grammar keeps analysis simpler than positing a new grammar.
  • I3. The errors run one way: present-for-past occurs, past-for-present does not. Knowing the direction of likely errors narrows which corrections are plausible.
  • I4. The markedness discussion (from Battistella) shows English present tense is unmarked for time and can express habitual, future or narrative-past meanings, while past tense clearly signals past.
  • I5. Counting suppliance of a form in obligatory contexts (places where native speakers would require it) gives a concrete way to measure morphological accuracy.

For Mova

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

  • I1 (learn): Build such contrast sets as negative controls, e.g., check whether a supposed corpus-specific parser error also shows up on another corpus with the same structural property.
  • I2 (tokens): Let the tagger and morphology accept bare verbs where -s or -ed is expected, assigning tense and agreement features from context rather than failing.
  • I3 (world): When building event order from non-native text, a bare or present verb in a past narrative can be reinterpreted as past, but a past form should be trusted as past.
  • I4 (world): Do not map present tense to "now" by default. Infer the time from adverbs and discourse, and treat past morphology as the stronger temporal signal.
  • I5 (back): Use obligatory-context checks to evaluate generated text, flagging missing agreement -s or past -ed wherever the meaning graph requires them.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Universiti Malaysia Sarawak.

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 9,206 worksPsychology · 798 worksExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 463 works

🧭 Topics 4Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 worksMorphology · 277 worksGrammatical error correction & learner language · 80 worksPsycholinguistics & language acquisition · 66 works

Cite

Cite as Boluwaji Oshodi. 2014. Assessing the so called Marked Inflectional Features of the Nigerian English: a Second Language Acquisition Theory Account. Ikala: Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura 19.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{oshodi2014assessing,
  title = {{Assessing the so called Marked Inflectional Features of the Nigerian English: a Second Language Acquisition Theory Account}},
  author = {Boluwaji Oshodi},
  booktitle = {Ikala: Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura 19},
  year = {2014},
  doi = {10.17533/udea.ikala.14303},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17533/udea.ikala.14303}
}

References

31 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Adegbija, E. (1989). Lexico-semantic variation in Nigerian English, World Englishes. Vol. 8, No.2, pp. 165-177. ↗
  2. Adetugbo, A. (1979). Appropriateness in Nigerian English & Nigerian English and communicative competence. In E. Ubahakwe (Ed.), Varieties and functions of English in Nigeria, pp. 137-165 & 167-183 respectively. Ibadan: African Universities Press. find
  3. Alo, M., & Mesthrie, R. (2008). Nigerian English: morphology and syntax. In R. Mesthrie, (Ed.), M edellín –C olombia , V ol . 19, I ssue 1 (J anuary –A pril 2014), pp. 15–26, ISSN 0123-3432 www.udea.edu.co/ikala Varieties of English, Africa, South and Southeast Asia, (pp. 323-339). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. ↗
  4. Bamiro, E. (1991). Nigerian Englishes in Nigerian English literature, World Englishes. Vol. 10, No. 1, pp. 7-17. ↗
  5. Bamiro, E. (1991). The social and functional power of Nigerian English, World Englishes. Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 275-286. ↗
  6. Battistella, E. L. (1990). Markedness: The evaluative superstructure of language. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. find
  7. Chomsky, N. (1986). Knowledge of language: its origin, nature and use. New York, Praeger. find
  8. Geckin, V., & Hazenadar, B. (2008). The morphology/ syntax interface in child L2 acquisition: evidence from verbal morphology. Current trends in child second language acquisition: A generative perspective. In B, Haznedar & E. Gavruseva (Eds.), 237-270. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gut, U., & Fuchs. ↗
  9. R. (2013). Progressive aspect in Nigerian English. Journal of English linguistics 41(3), 243-276. find
  10. Hazenadar, B. (2007). The acquisition of tense-aspect in child language English. Second Language Research 23, (4) 383-417. find
  11. Haznedar, B., & Schwartz, B. (1997). Are there optional infinitives in child L2 acquisition? In Proceedings of the 21 st annual Boston University conference on language development. In E. Hughs, & A. Greenhill (Eds.), 257-268. Sommerville, MA: Cascadilla Press. find
  12. Ionin, T., & Wexler, K. (2002). Why is ‘is’ easier than ‘-s’? Acquisition of tense/agreement morphology by child second language learners of English. Second Language Research, 18, 95-136. find
  13. Jakobson, R. (1984). Shifters, verbal categories and the Russian verb. Selected writings, Vol. 2: Word and Language, 130-147. The Hague: Mouton. find
  14. Kachru, B. (1987). The alchemy of English: The speed, functions and models of non-native Englishes, World Englishes. Vol. 8, No. 2, pp.239-241. Reviewed. by J. Fishman. find
  15. Kachru, B. (1992a). World Englishes. In Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. find
  16. Kirkpatrick, A. (2011). World Englishes. In J. Simpson (Ed.), Handbook of Applied Linguistics. London: Routledge: 373-387. find
  17. Kujore, O. (1985). English usage: Some notable Nigerian variations. Ibadan: Evans Brothers Ltd. find
  18. Lardiere, D. (1998a). Case and tense in fossilized steady state grammar. Second Language Research, 14, 1-26. find
  19. Lardiere, D. (1998b). Dissociating syntax from morphology in a divergent L2 end-state grammar. Second Language Research, 14, 359-375. ↗
  20. McCarthy, C. L. (2007). Morphological variability in second language Spanish. PhD Dissertation. Department of Linguistics McGill University Montreal Canada. ↗
  21. Ogu, J. (1992). A Historical survey of English and the Nigerian situation. Lagos: Krafts Books Ltd. find
  22. Omar, A. (Ed.). (2004). The Encyclopedia of Malaysia: Languages & literature. (9 Vol.). Michigan: Archipelago Press. find
  23. Prevost, P., & White, L. (2000). Missing surface inflection or impairment in second language acquisition? Evidence from tense and agreement. Second Language Research, 16, 103-133. find
  24. Roslie, T., & Ting, Su Hie, (1994). Malaysian English: Exploring the possibility of standardization. find
  25. How to reference this article: Oshodi, B. (2014). Assessing the so Called Marked Inflectional Features of Nigerian English: A Second Language Acquisition Theory Account. Íkala, Revista de Lenguaje y Cultura, 19(1), 15-26. find
  26. M edellín –C olombia , V ol . 19, I ssue 1 (J anuary –A pril 2014), pp. 15–26, ISSN 0123-3432 www.udea.edu.co/ikala Perttanika Journal of social science and humanities, Vol, 2, (1). 69-76. find
  27. Selinker, L. (1972). Interlanguage. International Review of Applied Linguistics, 10, 209-231. find
  28. Salami, A. (1968). Defining a standard Nigerian English. Journal of the Nigerian English Studies Association (2)1, 99-106. find
  29. Slabakova, R. (2009). What is easy and what is hard to acquire in a second language. In Proceedings of the 10 th generative approaches to second language acquisition conference. In M. Bowles, T. Ionin, S. Montrul, & A. Tremblay, (Eds.), 280-294. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project. find
  30. Walsh, N. (1967). Distinguishing types and varieties of English in Nigeria. Journal of the Nigerian English Studies Association (2)2, 47-55. find
  31. White, L, (2003). Second language acquisition and universal grammar. Cambridge University Press. ↗

Updated

↑ back to top

This page in Markdown → https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/oshodi-2014-assessing-so-called-marked-inflectional/