Fossilization in Inflectional Morphemes by Persian Learners of English

This paper provides a cross-sectional study of the fossilized endstate L۲ English grammar of freshmen and junior university students of English. Results are presented from spontaneous production and grammaticality judgment tasks of two groups of the students, high-level (۲۴) and low-level (۱۹), concentrating on use of ۳ʳᵈ person simple present marker (-s), past tens marker (-ed) and pronominal case assignment. Data showed that despite low rate of suppliance of ۳ʳᵈ person imple present tense marker (-s) just in spontaneous task, students' suppliance of past tense marker (-ed) and pronominal case assignment is about perfect at both levels and tasks. Syntactic correlates (such as case assignment and presence of overt subject) were completely accurate, suggesting no underlying impairment to functional categories or features. There is some evidence from the L۱, which has the person and number features of the subject marked by verbal agreement but usually lacks the thirdperson singular in production task.

کلیدواژه ها:

Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis ، Impaired Representation on ، Case Assignment ، tense ، Persian