Expression of Temporality in the English Language- A Functional Approach
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Background to the Study
The English language has become an international medium of communication among people on earth. The mastery of good English is deemed necessary for bringing a lot of advantages in many ways. This international language is not only used for communication purposes but also in the fields of technology, commerce, education and many other aspects of life. The English language has its own grammar structures which have to be followed in order to understand how it is spoken and written fully. As Pollock puts it, the problem arises when someone comes to understand and learn English without having the basics been taught before, or translating his own language into English, to start a conversation (Pollock 365-424). One of such basics is the expression of temporality. Students learning a foreign language meet with many kinds of learning problems dealing with its sound system, vocabulary, structure, etc. In the EFL (English as a foreign language) context, knowledge of grammar, particularly tense, is considered to be the most crucial and difficult part for non-native learners to master properly. The errors committed by the learners also indicate what the second language learners do not master and what they have internalized of the interlanguage grammar. Linguists try to find out the causes of the problems and methods to be applied in language teaching, to minimize the problems. They propose contrastive analysis, error analysis and interlanguage theory as means of tackling learners‘ problems. A key finding of error analysis is that many learner errors are produced by learners making faulty inferences about the rules of the 2 new language. Richards distinguishes two types of errors, they are interlanguage errors and intralanguage errors. Interlanguage errors are those that are caused by the interference of learners‘ mother tongue (native language). Whereas, intralingual errors are those that reflect the learners‘ competence at a particular stage, and illustrate some of the general characteristics of language acquisition (173). These intralingual errors can be said to derive from some factors which Richards subdivided into four categories: Overgeneralization, Ignorance of rule restriction, Incomplete application of rule and False concepts hypothesized. Overgeneralization: According to Jacobvist quoted in Richards (174), overgeneralization or transfer is the use of previously availabe strategies in new situations. In second language learning, some of these strategies will prove helpful in organizing the facts about the second language, but others, perhaps due to superficial similarities, will be misleading and inapplicable. Overgeneralization covers instances where the learner creates a deviant structure on the basis of his experience of other structures in the target language. Based on the above statement, one can say that the cause of error in this case is not the influence of the mother tongue alone, but the influence of the target language which they have already learnt for example: ―He runs fastly‖. In this sentence, the learner produces an error because he/she generalizes that adverbs of manner must always be formed by adding ‗ly‘ to the adjectives. Ignorance of the Rule Restriction: This kind of error is closely related to overgeneralization. The learners fail to observe the restrictions of certain structures. They apply a rule in the context of the sentence where actually it is not necessary. E.g., ‗The man whom I saw him yesterday‘. The student does not know that it is impossible to mention the person referred to by the relative pronoun and by another pronoun as well.
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