Abstract
Writing papers with no grammatical errors or as few of them as possible is crucial for academic success. Yet, few Somali L2 writers ever achieve this goal. We analyze 20 essays to find out why Somali L2 writers fail to make numeral (Num) and/or quantifier (Q) agree with the head noun. An error analysis shows that 11 of the 20 essays contain 26 noun pluralization errors, thereby yielding an error rate of 2.36 per essay. This rate is too high, considering that the students who wrote the essays graduated from an American high school. The frequency and magnitude of the errors indicate that they cannot be dismissed as careless or accidental errors. Instead, they denote important morphosyntactic differences between Somali and English regarding how the two languages resolve number agreement rules. We are hopeful that the analyses carried out in this paper and the recommendations therewithin can help reduce such errors or eliminate them altogether.
Recommended Citation
Basnet, Pooja; Jonathan, Franklin L.; and Koffi, Ettien
(2025)
"NOUN PLURALIZATION ERRORS IN SOMALI L2 WRITING,"
Linguistic Portfolios: Vol. 14, Article 10.
Available at:
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/stcloud_ling/vol14/iss1/10
