Syntax and Morphemes

As mentioned in the introduction in Chapter 1, morphemes and syntax are also barriers to learning English as a second language in that they (morphemes and syntaxes) impact on students’ writing and speaking skills. However, this study did not look at morphemes and syntaxes as linguistic components on their own rather at whether students lack the skills to apply them in writing and speaking in English.

2.6.2.1 Syntax

This section explains syntax in detail. Syntax refers to the discipline that examines the rules of a language that dictate how the various parts of sentences go together and follow a sequence of words, according to The Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995). In the sentence that follows, there is a subject and predicate. John often comes late to class. John is the subject and the other part is the predicate. This means a sentence should include a subject and a predicate.

Normally, a sentence should begin with either a subject (a doer) or object (something or somebody that receives the action) followed by a verb. In this case, the rule of how various parts of a sentence go together which follow a sequence of words needs to be applied. Fromkin, et al (2003:118) define syntax as “the part of grammar that represents a speaker’s knowledge for sentences and their structures.” Fromkin, et al (2003:123) point out that syntactic rules determine the order of words in a sentence and how the words are grouped such as: “The child found the puppy” word order. The word group “the child” forms the subject while “found the puppy” is the predicate. Or the child – subject, found – verb, the puppy – object. Also, the following sentences have different meanings which, according to Fromkin, et al (2003:118), depend largely on the order in which words occur in the sentence: “She has what a man wants. She wants what a man has”. ”In Fromkin, et al. (2003:118)’s view, there are different types of syntactic categories or parts of speech such as noun phrase – NP, verb phrase – VP and so on.

These are decomposed into other syntactic categories such as phrasal: lexical categories such as noun and verb or functional categories such as: det – determiner, aux – auxiliary verb and comp– complimentizer if/whether for example “The teacher asked if the students understood the syntax lesson or I do not know whether I should talk about this”.

2.6.2.2 Morphemes

According to The Cambridge International Dictionary of English (1995) “a morpheme is the smallest linguistic unit that has a meaning on grammatical function.” While morphology looks at how the smallest linguistic units (morphemes) are formed into complete words, syntax looks at how these words are formed into complete sentences. Hamawand (2011) states that morphology is an essential subfield of linguistics, and further describes the structure and patterns of words formation in a language.

Morphology aims specifically to:

• pin down the principles for relating the form and meaning of morphological expressions; • explain how the morphological units are integrated and the resulting formations

• show how morphological units are organised in a particular language or subject in terms of affinity and contrast.

Dikuua-Fulkerson (2011:15) explains that English is a hybrid and it is crucial to understand its various roots or origins in order to understand exactly how words are formed. Dikuua- Fulkerson (2011:15) further defines morphology as a grammatical and linguistic study of the way in which words are constructed by various morphemes (units of meaning) to create a language.

According to Dikuua-Fulkerson (ibid), there are two types of word construction with regards to morphemes: monomorphic, which contains one morpheme and polymorphic, which contains more than one morpheme. Elturki (2011:1) discusses the type of morphology that poses difficulties to English as a second language learner. According to Elturki (ibid), a free morpheme can stand by itself as a single word and normally does not pose any problem to ESL learners, for example: “man” and “walk”. However a bound morpheme cannot stand by itself and according to him, this might pose a problem to ESL for example words that begin with the prefix ‘dis’ and words that end in the suffixes ‘ ness’ and ‘tion’.

Yule (2010: 67) refers to morphology as the study of forms. This is a term originally used in biology but has also been used to describe the type of investigation that analyses ‘all the basic elements’ in the form of a linguistic message known as morphemes in a language. Yule (ibid) talks about two types of morphemes: free and bound morphemes and describes free morphemes as morphemes that can stand on their own, for example open and tour. Bound morphemes cannot stand on their own and are typically attached to another form (affixes). According to Yule (2010:69) there are two sets that make up the category of bound morphemes and they are called derivational and inflectional morphemes. The derivational morphemes include suffixes and prefixes. Suffixes and prefixes are linguistic units that are added to a root word either at the beginning or the end of the word, for example, the word ‘undressed’ prefix un and suffix ed. Inflectional morphemes serve as grammatical markers that indicate tense, number, possession, or comparison, for example, the suffixes -s (or -es); 's (or s'); -ed; - en; -er; -est; and –ing. This study aimed at investigating whether students use derivational and inflectional morphemes in their writing and speaking.

There are several questions regarding morphology. For example, Lieber (2010:6) asks, ‘why do languages have morphology?’ According to Lieber (2010:6) there are different reasons why morphology is used. One reason is to form new words, for example, turning verbs into nouns or adjectives, for example, the verb amuse can be turned into the noun amusement and into the adjective amusing. The other reason is that morphology is used when new words are not needed. For example, the word walk has many forms such as walk, walks, walked, walking. These different types of forms can be used in different grammatical contexts. When the word form is changed to fit in a particular grammatical context, this process is called inflection. According to Lieber (2010:7) inflectional word formation is word formation that expresses grammatical distinctions like number (singular vs. plural), tense, (present vs. past), person (first, second or third) and case (subject, object, possessive) and so on.

Fromkin, Rodman and Hyams (2003:107) define morphology as the study of word formation and the internal structure of words. Fromkin, et al.(2003:107) describe a morpheme as the minimal unit of linguistic meaning or grammatical function. According to Fromkin, et al. (2003:107), morphemes combine according to the morphological rules of the language, i.e. words that can be analysed into smaller parts.

Fromkin, et al. (2003:107) further say that lexical content morphemes that cannot be analysed into smaller parts are called root morphemes such as, free, king or bore. Fromkin, et al. (2003:76) mention that there are particular morphemes that must be attached to host morphemes (bound) which are called derivational morphemes when they are added to a root morpheme or stem, for example, -ify, -cation) to form a new word meaning and those that can stand alone (free).

According to Fromkin, et al. (2003:77), morphemes may be derivational or inflectional. Inflectional morphemes are also types of morphemes but have a strictly grammatical function in that they mark properties such a tense, number, gender case and so on. For example, He sails the ocean blue. The ‘s’ at the end of the verb shows that the subject of the verb is the third person singular and the verb is in the present tense. In He sailed the ocean blue, the ‘ed’ at the end of the verb shows the past tense of the verb. While this study looks at the use of morphological aspects by the students at tertiary level in writing and oral skills, Newton, Padak and Rasinski (2011:5-7) look at ‘building vocabulary through morphological study’ through Latin-Greek connections. Newton, et al. (2011:21) claim that a reader’s knowledge

of the meaning of words and concepts, is central to success in reading. They focused on elementary students’ vocabulary. On this issue, Carlisle (2010:465) in Newton, et al. (2011:21) observes that “children learn morphemes as they learn the language.” Hatch (1983:24) in Behjat and Sadighi (2011) argues that perhaps students who have problems in acquiring bound morphemes did not develop a good command of grammar rules at an early stage. In support of Hatch’s (ibid) argument, Newton, et al. (2011:21) say that a very productive study of words that focuses on meaningful word patterns and the instruction in morphology awareness on literacy achievement should be developed at an early age of schooling.

Therefore, this study investigates the combination of the two (morphemes and syntaxes) on the following parts of speech: subject and verb agreement, copula, possessive case, progressive form, plural nouns and auxiliaries in writing skills and oral communication and in English.

In Namibia, students at tertiary level have been exposed to English and are in an environment where they have contact with, and opportunity to practice what they have learnt in classrooms, but the question is: if students show their incompetence in language usage, how are they expected to exhibit their competence of morphemes and syntaxes? This study examines how students use English morphemes and syntaxes in the English classroom setting. The following section discusses the research context of this study.