Assessed assignment 2 - Data Analysis Exercise - Essay Example

The plural form of ‘time’ is used in English but in specific contexts and with different connotations. Lot of – the speaker has used this term to qualify both count as well as non- count nouns. He seems to prefer this term and has never used ‘very” or “many’ as native speakers would have done. One children, a children –We do find subject verb agreement between “are’ and ‘children’. The speaker says, “there are only one children.’ For the native speaker, it is an irregular plural but the speaker has mis-analysed the form, hence his use of one/a is consistent with his treatment of this form as singular.

We can conclude that for speaker A, children is semantically singular but syntactically plural. The bare verb form is used as nominals where native speakers would use –ing form for deriving nominals from verbs in these contexts. When –ing forms of verbs are used as nouns or adjectives they are called gerunds. Own – this word sounds more or less like earn. Perhaps, the speakers have never come across the word in writing or have never learnt it as an item of vocabulary, but may have just heard the word from others in speech.

Hence they replaced it by the similar sounding word that they knew. Independent, independence – Both have made a different kind of mistake and both are incorrect. When natives speak about being independent of something, there is an implication that it was a nuisance or troublesome. It cannot be said about parents. The speaker B uses the noun form where the adjective form should be used. From the use of the above regular and irregular plurals, we can conclude that speaker B uses these words correctly and target like.

He seems to have understood the count noun singular –plural contrast. CONCLUSION – The two speakers are similar in the way they diverge from the expected target forms in some respects, and different in other respects.