The Acquisition and Use of the -S Plural Morpheme by Third-Year Students of English in a Nigerian University

Abstract

This study examined the acquisition and use of the -S plural morpheme by third-year English undergraduates neglected in previous studies involving advanced L2 learners. It aimed at identifying all accurate and inaccurate instantiations of the form, determining their frequency of occurrence, specifying the context of occurrence of each plural bearing or non-bearing common noun, accounting for errors, and suggesting ways of improving L2 learners’ acquisition and use of the English -S plural morpheme. The data comprised 1219 common nouns generated from essays written by 15 volunteer English Education students at the Lagos State University, Nigeria. The Combined CA-EA-IL theory which argues that neither CA nor EA nor IL is sufficiently powerful on its own to account for L2 acquisition guided the study, while syntactic and textual parameters aided the analysis. Findings showed that 93 percent (1132) of the data represent correct usage and 7.14 percent (87) represent incorrect usage. Non-suppliance of the -S plural morpheme in non-obligatory contexts accounted for 74.2 percent (905), while its suppliance in obligatory contexts, non-suppliance in obligatory contexts, and suppliance in non-obligatory contexts respectively represent 18.6 (227), 6.1 (73) and 1.1 (14) percent of the data. Precisely 40 percent of the participants committed 74 percent of the errors, with 43 percent of the non-suppliance-in-obligatory- contexts errors occurring among clausal elements semantically indicating plurality. This implies that successful learning still eluded some learners despite the high level of exposure they got. Evidence of poor learning, ignorance of rules, over-generalisation, and inconsistency abound but only one incontestably L1-influenced error occurred.