Show simple item record

dc.contributor.advisorWestergaard, Marit
dc.contributor.authorBasnet, Lila Dhoaj
dc.date.accessioned2018-07-06T12:07:05Z
dc.date.available2018-07-06T12:07:05Z
dc.date.issued2017-05-15
dc.description.abstractAbstract The thesis investigates Nepali L1 speakers’ knowledge of syntax and morphology in L2 English to test whether functional morphology is more difficult than syntax. Accordingly, the study mainly included two constructions: subject-verb agreement and word order. Subject-verb agreement was used to test knowledge of functional morphology while word order was used to test the knowledge about syntax. The experiment included a total of 48 participants from Nepal between the ages of 15-18 and was carried out in a private boarding school in Kathmandu. The experiment was based on an online survey tool, Survey Gizmo, which included an acceptability judgement test, a proficiency test and a background questionnaire. The experiment used acceptability judgement test as the main method to collect the required data. The main test included 46 test items in total, out of which 10 were fillers. The test included simple declarative main clauses with lexical verbs and all of them begin with DP subjects. Accordingly, subject-initial declarative sentence (in simple past tense) tested word order (syntax) while subject-verb agreement (functional morphology) was tested by subject-initial declarative sentence (simple present tense) with 3rd person singular and plural subject. In addition, the experiment included a subset of a Standardized Oxford Proficiency test which contains 40 multiple choice test items in order to examine the proficiency level of the participants along with a set of background questionnaires. The main findings reported in the study show that subject-verb agreement is significantly more difficult than word order in acquisition of English L2 by Nepali speakers. Furthermore, the results also show that subject-verb agreement is persistently difficult for the proficient learners too. In contrast, all the participants show good performance in word order which shows that there is not any correlation between proficiency score and word order. It also reveals that participants’ knowledge of word order is not related to proficiency score since all participants whether they have high proficiency score or not, are already good enough. On the other hand, a weak correlation between subject-verb agreement and proficiency scores suggests that the performance of the participants on agreement remains constant though proficiency scores increases.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10037/13176
dc.language.isoengen_US
dc.publisherUiT Norges arktiske universiteten_US
dc.publisherUiT The Arctic University of Norwayen_US
dc.rights.accessRightsopenAccessen_US
dc.rights.holderCopyright 2017 The Author(s)
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0en_US
dc.rightsAttribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)en_US
dc.subject.courseIDENG-3991
dc.subjectVDP::Humanities: 000::Linguistics: 010::English language: 020en_US
dc.subjectVDP::Humaniora: 000::Språkvitenskapelige fag: 010::Engelsk språk: 020en_US
dc.titleAcquisition of subject-verb agreement and word order by Nepali learners of English: The Bottleneck Hypothesis in L2 acquisitionen_US
dc.typeMaster thesisen_US
dc.typeMastergradsoppgaveen_US


File(s) in this item

Thumbnail
Thumbnail

This item appears in the following collection(s)

Show simple item record

Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
Except where otherwise noted, this item's license is described as Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)