Conversion

[saadiya77]

I am m.a student .my study is"investigating the errors committed by EFL Iraqi learners in using Conversion" what kind of error can I consider it when the students do'nt know to identify parts of speech.For exampe ,they do'nt know weather "dirty" in "he dirtied his clothes " is a V. or an Adj. Is it interlingual, intralingual or something else?

[Tdol]

I don't speakArabic, so I have no idea whether there is L1 interference here. However, they should be able to work out from the suffix that it is a verb. Do Arabic nouns and adjectives convert easilyto verbs?

[Casiopea]

In order to identify the parts of speech in a given language, one has to know something about (a) what the words look like in that language, and (b) what the word order is in that language--English is SVO: Subject+Verb+Object.

If a learner identifies 'dirtied' as an adjective, then there are two possible reasons for the error:

Intralingual Error: Applying the rules of English incorrectly
1) The learner knows that 'dirty' is an adjective, and so s/he assumes 'dirtied', which looks like 'dirty, is just a variation. S/he assumes so because other adjectives in English end in -ed.

Interlingual Error: Transferring L1 rules over to English
2) Adjectives occur in that position in the learner's native language.

Note, 2) is false.