Morpho-Syntactic ‘Intraference’ in Educated Nigerian English (ENE)

Abstract

Interference is a major feature of English as a Second Language (ESL). Besides interference, there are ‘theovergeneralization of linguistic materials and semantic features’ in ‘interlanguage’ (Selinker, 1984, p.37),‘intralingual interference’ or ‘systemic intralingual errors’ (Richards and Sampson, 1984, pp. 6-13) and ‘the internalprinciple/factors of linguistic variability’ (Labov, 1994, p.84). In this paper, ‘Intraference’ is used as a moreeconomical term for these long terminologies. Library research, questionnaires and the record of live linguisticevents by educated Nigerians were used to gather data to demonstrate syntactic intraference in ENE from 2006 to2012. It is then shown that educated Nigerians produce syntactic intraference cases mainly in the use of noun andprepositional phrases, multiple verbs, non-finite verb and subordinate clauses, collocation and the repetition ofstructures. These features distinguish ENE from SBE. Intraference features are not necessarily vulgar errors, but theoutcomes of the redeployment of English rules and items engendered by psycho-sociolinguistic factors.