Relative clause marker and antecedent agreement: exploring the English of Premiere students in some selected schools in Yaounde

Abstract

his study investigates the use of relative clause marker and antecedent agreement in the English of Première students in some selected schools in Yaounde, Cameroon. This study is carried out within the theoretical framework of the Binding Theory Principle B (Chomsky, 1981). In order to obtain quantitative and qualitative data, respondents of three Première classes, one each from Government High School Anguissa, Government Bilingual High School Nkol-Eton and Government Bilingual High School Emana, were given a production test. A total of 161 respondents took part in the exercise. This produced 161 scripts. The data collected from these scripts amounted to 3220 tokens. Out of this number, respondents produced 1167 instances where by they respected the input-oriented parameter settings stipulated by the Binding Theory Principle B. Hence, they scored 36.6% in setting the parameters. This is opposed to 2053 (63.8%) instances in which other parameter settings were employed. There were quite a number of feature specifications present in the corpus collected. They included: substitution of the relative pronoun “which” for “who”; substitution of the relative pronoun “who” for “which”; substitution of one case form for another case form; substitution of the relative pronoun “who” for “that” in non-defining clauses; substitution of the relative adverbs “where” and “when” for the relative pronoun “that” as well as some completely novel syntactic features. This is a cause for concern as it raises serious pedagogical questions as far as the teaching and learning of the English language in the EFL context.