Currently, it is an established fact that English is regarded as the global language (Crystal, 2004). English is spoken around the globe; it was estimated that in the early 2000s, almost 1.5 billion people around the world is competent in the English language. Based on Zhu (2001) and Crystal (1997), it is estimated that 427 million people speak English as their first language (L1) while 950 million speak English as their second language (L2) (Saville-Troike, 2012). Thus, there is a higher percentage of the world’s population speaking English as L2 than L1. This is about a quarter of the world’s population and this figure, unsurprisingly, continues to grow (Crystal, 2004).
According to Finegan (2009), the global spread of English around the world is attributed to several reasons, namely; the social prestige of English, the need for English in technological advancement as well as the simplicity of English inflections compared to other languages. In many English post-colonial countries, English fulfills a prioritised and privileged role (Kirkpatrick, 2010). English is regarded as a crucial tool for social and economic mobility. Thus, because of this role, the learning and use of English is greatly pursued by countless people, which, in turn, contributes to the global spread of English. Pertaining to technological advancement, the dissemination of American technologies in the 20th and 21st centuries led to the spread of English throughout the world. When talking about the inflectional structure of English, some scholars claim that the extension of English might have to do with its inflectional simplicity compared to languages like German and Russian. English inflections are few and relatively easy to learn compared to heavily inflected languages. Take English nouns, for example; the language has only two variants in speech, a marked variant for possessive singulars and all plurals, and unmarked one for all other functions. Other than a few exceptions like teeth and oxen, plurals are formed by adding /s/ or /z/ or /ez/ to the stems, which will be described later in the morphological section of English. There are no inflectional prefixes or infixes in English.
In terms of typological family, English and all its varieties is classified as a West-Germanic language of the Indo-European family languages, together with
German, Dutch and Frisian (Hawkins, 2009). In the following section, English phonetics and phonological characters are described.
2.2.1 Phonetics and phonology. This section provides an overview of the consonant and vowels in English language. The following tables describe the consonants and vowels in English. Due to the global status of the language, there are many variations of English; so, the descriptions will be based on the Standard variety of British English (SBE). There are 25 consonantal phonemes and 10 vowel phonemes in English.
Table 2.5
Consonants in English, taken from Meyer (2009, p.199) Bilabial Labiodental Dental Alveolar Post-
alveolar
Palatal Velar Glottal
Plosives p b t d k g Nasals m n ŋ Fricatives f v θ ð s z ʃ h Affricates tʃ d Central approximants (w) ɹ j w Lateral approximants l Table 2.6
Vowels in English, adapted from Ladefoged (2005, pp.28-30)
Front Near-front Central Near-back Back
Close i u Near-close I υ Close-mid ei əυ Mid ə Open-mid ε ɔ Near-open Open ɒ
There are three diphthongs in English, namely /ai/ in ‘fight’, /aυ/ in ‘house’ and /ɔi/ in ‘boy’. However, it is important to remember that the system of vowels as illustrated here is somewhat an idealisation. Ladefoged and Johnson (2010, p.87)
characterise the vowel notions of height, frontness and backness as “labels that describe how vowels sound in relation to one another. They are not absolute descriptions of the position of the body of the tongue.” Unlike consonants, they further state that, “there are no distinct boundaries between one type of vowel and another.” However, though the categories are simply labels, it is the only convenient way for scholars to describe and compare vowels. If we compare English to Malay in terms of the sound systems, English has more consonants and vowel phonemes, as Malay only possesses 21 consonants and six vowel phonemes.
English is a “stress-timed” language (Fromkin et al., 2011); which means that certain syllables in a word are louder, slightly higher in pitch and the duration is also longer than other syllables in a word. Generally, at least one syllable is stressed in an English word. This is in contrast to Malay; Malay is a syllable-timed language in which there are no differences in terms of loudness, duration and pitch between the syllables in a Malay word.
2.2.2 Morphology and syntax. Inflectional and derivational morphemes play a crucial role in English word structure. Inflections do not change the meaning or part of speech of a word, but instead mark various grammatical relations. Table 2.7 summarises the inflectional morphemes in English.
Inflectional morphemes form a small class in English but derivational morphemes are a much larger class (Meyer, 2009). Derivational morphemes can be either prefixes or suffixes while inflectional morphemes can only be suffixes. Also, derivational morphemes change the meaning of a word as well as its parts of speech e.g. adding the prefix dis- to the base ‘like’ results in ‘dislike’, which is the opposite to the meaning of the base ‘like’ and adding the suffix -able to ‘like’ changes the form from verb to the adjective ‘likable’.
Table 2.7
Inflections in English, taken from Meyer (2009, p.153)
Inflections Descriptions Examples
-s Singular he/she likes movies
-s Possessive the child’s toys
-s Plurals girl/girls
-ing Progressive aspect he/she is leaving
-ed Past tense he/she talked for an hour
-ed Perfective aspect he/she has talked for an hour
-er Comparative form of adjective mild/milder
This thesis focuses on the plural expressions of the bilingual child in Malay and English, thus in what follows I will focus on plural morphology in English. Plurality in English is commonly expressed by suffixing the morpheme -s for most countable nouns. This -s suffix has three allomorphs: [s] (e.g. cats or lamps), [z] (e.g. dogs or days), and [əz] (e.g. horses or watches) (Carstairs-McCarthy, 2002; Ettlinger & Zapf, 2011). Irregular suffixes expressing plurality include -i, -ae and -a (as in cacti, formulae, phenomena), as well as the suffix -(r) en that shows up only in oxen, children and brethren (Carstairs-McCarthy, 2002). Some English nouns are also isomorphic (in which the singular and plural forms are the same), for example sheep, fish, and deer. Regarding noun countability, the count-mass distinction is a salient grammatical feature in English. Only countable nouns such as house, coin, and leg can be paired with indefinite article while mass nouns like water, money and butter cannot take the indefinite article. This is due to the lack of conceptual bounding in the noun referents (cf. Bloom, 1994). Mass nouns in English are paired with mensural classifiers and unitisers, for instance some water, much money, little butter, a drop of water, piece of glass, cake of soap (Sew, 2007). Both mensural classifiers and unitisers provide a conceptual boundary to mass nouns, hence facilitating the distinction between count and mass nouns in English (Sew, 2007). In terms of numerals, countable nouns can be paired with numerals for example, one woman, three dogs but uncountable nouns, as discussed, must be paired with mensural classifiers or unitisers, such as one glass of water, two pounds of sand and three plumes of smoke (Gil, 2013). Generic entities in English are expressed with the plural suffix -s if they are countable, for instance I like apples; on the contrary, the uncountable generic entities use the singular form such as I like tea, I like coffee. However, generics in English can also be expressed through definite singulars, for example, the tiger is a ferocious beast and indefinite singulars, like a tiger is a ferocious beast (Hollander, Gelman, & star, 2002).
Pertaining to the syntactic structure, English word order is SVO (Subject- Verb-Object). In this regard, Malay and English are of the same group of word order. Based on the classification of syntactic structure of languages by Tomlin (1986), he found that SOV (Subject-Object-Verb) and SVO were the most preferred word order in the 402 languages he surveyed. The data from Tomlin are shown in the following table:
Table 2.8
Word order types and frequencies, taken from Tomlin (1986, p. 22)
Word order Frequency Example languages
SOV 180 languages (44.78%) Bengali, Gothic, Hindi, Japanese, Kurdish, Latin, Persian, Turkish.
SVO 168 languages (41.79%) Arabic (colloquial), English, French, Malay, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Vietnamese.
VSO 37 languages
(9.20%)
Arabic (literary), Aramaic, Hebrew, Irish.
VOS 12 languages
(2.99%)
Aneityan, Baure.
OVS 5 languages
(1.24%)
Apalai, Arecua, Hixkaryana.
OSV 0
Total 402
The bilingual child in this thesis was exposed to Australian English variety (AusE). There are significant differences in linguistic features between the standard English reviewed here and AusE, especially in terms of lexical and phonological properties (cf. Burridge, 2010) but for plural morphology, there are no differences between them. Both varieties express plurality with the standard English grammatical features (suffix -s and so forth).
2.2.3 Pronouns. In English, situational contexts do not change the pronouns, as in Malay but its form changes depending on the grammatical role. The first-person pronoun, if it is in subject position and comes before verb, is I but if it comes after verb, it is me (Goddard, 2005). For example, I am studying for a Russian test (I is the subject of am studying) and she asked me to study for the test (me is the object of asked). This is in contrast to Malay pronouns, which stay the same regardless of position or grammatical role, for instance saya is used in both subject and object positions as in saya sedang mengulangkaji untuk ujian Bahasa Rusia ‘I am studying for a Russian test’ (saya is in subject position) and dia menyuruh saya mengulangkaji untuk ujian Bahasa Rusia ‘he/she asked me to study for a Russian test’ (saya in object position). The summary of English pronouns based on its grammatical role is depicted in the following table:
Table 2.9
List of English pronouns, taken from Finegan (2009, p. 73)
1st person 2nd person 3rd person 3rd person 3rd person
Singular
Nominative I you he she it
Accusative me you him her it
Genitive mine yours his hers its
Dative me you him her it
Plural
Nominative we you they
Accusative us you them
Genitive ours yours theirs
Dative us you them
Up until now, I have described the major typological features of Malay and