Igbo-English Bilinguals’ Performance in Passive Constructions in English and Its Implications for National Development
Keywords:
passive constructions, Minimalist Program, movement, national developmentAbstract
This paper investigates Igbo English bilinguals’ performance in passive constructions. Three hundred subjects drawn from three tertiary institutions in Abia and Imo States formed the population. Data were elicited from the subjects through a structured written test labelled ‘Grammaticality Judgement’ which required the subjects to identify passive sentences that best transformed given active voice sentences. The study adopted two theoretical approaches, namely Error Analysis (EA) and Chomsky’s Minimalist Program (MP). Data collected were analysed at the two levels of computational system, as discussed in Minimalism, namely, Phonetic Form (PF) and Logical Form (LF). Findings from data analysis reveal that over 35% of the subjects were unable to identify passive sentences that best transformed the active voice sentences given as test questions. The research, therefore, concludes that greater percent of Igbo-English bilinguals are competent in the language of wider communication and consequently will be able to participate effectively in the national development programmes. The paper recommends that serious attention be paid to teaching of English tenses as findings reveal that the verb category posed serious syntactic difficulty for the subjects.
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