Analiza grešaka pri upotrebi nefinitnih klauza kod studenata anglistike

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation describes and analyses the errors made by EFL university students when using the nonfinite clauses in the syntactic functions of complements and modifiers. Students’ errors are defined as a special kind of learning strategy – avoidance of the mentioned structures. They are identified in the corpus containing students’ translations of the Serbian sentences from the questionnaire. The starting premise is that these errors, evident in the use of the English nonfinite clauses, are not so much the product of the students’ incompetence in English as of the interference of the mother tongue, Serbian. Thus, they are to be examined as the unavoidable consequences of the structural differences between the two languages. The methods used are contrastive and empirical, together with description and classification. Grammatical structures of both languages are described with a special focus on the empirical part for the classification of the students’ errors. The Serbian sentences from the questionnaire are specially constructed to contain the finite nominal, relative and adverbial clauses in the syntactic functions of complements and modifiers since these structures are expected to create the mother tongue interference when translated into English. The final results of the dissertation, based on the theoretical part (contrastive analysis, error analysis and the grammatical and syntactic framework of English and Serbian) and the empirical part are three original contrastive models (English, Serbian and English- Serbian) and three sub-models within them. These contrastive models are an original contribution to the contrastive analysis of English and Serbian since the examined finite and nonfinite clauses are described, classified and contrasted in a comprehensive way. The conclusions are: overlapping of the English and Serbian finite and nonfinite clauses in their general syntactic functions and differences regarding the number of individual syntactic functions, frequency of their use and formal variety. The implications are thus twofold: scientific and pedagogical. The contrastive analysis of the English and Serbian clauses, nonfinite in particular, regarding their syntactic properties, is a modest contribution to a further development of syntax in both languages. The results of the empirical research are of a great pedagogical significance, especially for EFL tertiary level teaching, since they indicate the interference of the mother tongue in the students’