ERRORS IN PAUCAL AND PARTITIVE PHRASES IN SERBIAN AS A FOREIGN LANGUAGE

Abstract

The paper conducts a morphological-syntactic analysis of errors recorded in paucal and partitive phrases. The corpus has been formed by extracting material from written assignments of a heterogeneous group of students (speakers of one of 18 native languages) who attended an intensive Serbian language course (levels A1 and A2) at the Center for Serbian as a Foreign Language at the Faculty of Philosophy in Novi Sad. The aims of the analysis are the following: identification of errors, their systematization according to types (paucal and partitive phrases) and subtypes (paucal phrases with the number two, three, or four, partitive phrases that are numeral, adverbial, or noun phrases), quantitative and statistical processing, presentation of the analysis results according to (sub)types of errors, their frequency of occurrence and according to the student's first language, and finally a comparison of the findings with the results of earlier analyses of errors in these phrases in the production of students whose native language is Slovenian, Russian, French and Hungarian, as well as in the speech production of children of our emigrants in Sweden. The analysis has shown that foreign students make mistakes more frequently in partitive phrases (169 examples) than in paucal ones (97), and that their mistakes are largely consistent with mistakes made by students of Slavic (Slovenian and Russian) and non-Slavic languages (French and Hungarian), although in the case of Slovenian and Hungarian speakers, it is claimed that the errors are the result of cross-linguistic interference. A significant similarity with the developmental errors of children in the diaspora has been established as well. Almost all errors found in earlier analyses have also been confirmed in our corpus (24 occurrences), there has been no confirmation for three phenomena recorded in the speech of children in the diaspora and one in the production of Hungarian students.