Abstract: A lot of learners of English have persisting problems in the correct use of verb tenses. This lead to the study of the errors that Bulgarian learners of English make in their production. The article deals especially with the auxiliary verbs in English as one of the main types of verbs. Although they do not have their own meaning, the auxiliaries can perform different functions by expressing tense (providing time reference, i.e. past, present, or future), grammatical aspect (expressing the way a verb relates to the flow of time), modality (expressing necessity, permissibility and probability, and negations of these), voice (describing the relationship between the action expressed by the verb and the participant identified by the subject, object, etc.), or adding emphasis to the sentence.The study was based on traditional concepts of auxiliaries as being helpers of some sort, as opposed to the main verbs and focused on an analysis of learners’ errors. Since verbs are a particularly rich source of errors, it aimed to identify types and patterns of errors in the language learning process. In gathering the data, the researcher used a few tests and the procedures consisted of writing sentences or filling in the gaps, collecting and documenting the data, identifying, classifying, calculating the percentage of the data, and reporting the analysis. The corpus analysed was comprised of the learners’ examples.The article attempts to answer the following questions: Why do learners limit the use of inversion to specific question words? What causes errors as the double marking of tense in English? Discussion of the errors and possible reasons for them given by other researchers in the field are also analysed.Other problems that are discussed concern the identical forms of some auxiliary and main verbs (be, do and have). The article addresses the question of the syntactic functional (but not semantic) relations between the English auxiliaries and the verbal elements that follow them. If learners cannot distinguish them, they will make mistakes connected with inflexions, negative main verbs, the combination of auxiliary verbs, the order of auxiliary verbs, or word order. On the one hand, the errors support the idea that learners use the language productively, not just repeating what they hear. On the other hand, they intuitively use the type of linguistic category the way they use the main verbs be, do and have as regular, but never use the same forms for the auxiliaries be, do and have.Having in mind that there are no auxiliary verbs in all the languages that can be easily mistaken with main verbs, the hypothesis that learners possess an innate mechanism that lets them distinguish the auxiliaries from the main verbs is less probable.The author of the article concludes that there is no single analysis that covers all the auxiliaries. Each one needs to be examined on its own terms.
Publication Year: 2017
Publication Date: 2017-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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