| Summary: | 碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系 === 91 === This thesis is a study of a particular kind of error commonly found in English of learners in Taiwan referred to in this thesis as bare singular errors (BSEs). This error type is illustrated in the underlined noun in *I love dog because they are cute and honest. Three purposes of the study are: (1) to uncover patterns in learners’ bare singular errors; (2) to clarify whether the bare singular error is the result of language transfer or overgeneralization or some other source; (3) to offer guidelines for an instructional remedy for the bare singular error according to the results of (1) and (2).
Researchers as well as teachers have long assumed that BSEs are due either to learners’ lack of the knowledge of English nouns’ countability or to their lack of grammatical knowledge that countable nouns must either have a determiner or appear in plural form. The investigation finds, however, that many learners who have both sorts of knowledge still produce bare singulars and cannot recognize them as errors. The hypothesis proposed to explain this phenomenon is that these learners have a generalization in their interlanguage concerning the use of English nouns: namely, bare singulars can be used in expressing generics. A corpus of learner English is utilized to extract data and to detect patterns in learners’ bare singular errors. Comparisons with Chinese bare nouns and English noun phrases are made and a pilot test is reported which confirms the main hypothesis that learners assume bare singulars can be used in expressing generics. On the basis of these research results, some guidelines on giving feedback to errors of this kind are suggested.
|
|---|
