GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES IN EFL CONTEXT

Abstract

Introduction The inspiring works of Berko (1958), Cazden (1968), and Brown (1973) on the acquisition of English have made the inflectional morphology a central topic in language acquisition research. As defined in Saxton (2010) morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a language and these units can be smaller than a word, which means that every word comprises one or more morphemes. Pica (1988) further asserts that morpheme analysis can provide important insights into the sequences, processes, and input relevant to second language acquisition. It is, therefore, predicted that if the subjects can supply the correct plural ending –for instance, to a noun which is made up- they have internalized a working system of the plural allomorphs in English, and are able to generalize to new cases and select the right form. Grammatical morphemes can be classified as free morphemes which can function independently as words (his, a, the, etc.) and bound morphemes which appear as parts of words. Most of the bound morphemes in English are prefixes, suffixes or affixes (talking, talked, tables, etc.). Bound morphemes can also be distinguished as derivational and inflectional morphemes. Derivational morphemes are those which might change or modify grammatical category of a word when added. For example, adding -ful to beauty changes the word from a noun to an adjective beautiful. The form that results from the addition of a derivational morpheme is called a derived word or a derivative. On the other hand, inflectional morphemes are those which do not affect the meaning but they are added to another morph or group of morphs in order to change the function of the word indicating tense, case, number or other grammatical features. In this respect, the primary concern of this study is to discover the inflectional morphology knowledge in an EFL context. In this study we have a mix of bound morphemes as suffixes (progressive, past regular, past irregular, adjective, comparative/superlative forms, plural, possessive and third singular person) and some compounds (-man, -house, etc.).