Interpretations of English Nominal Elements by Kamba Speakers in Kenya

Language principles are innate and all human beings are endowed with such ability to acquire and be competent in any human language. Notably, there are subtle variations in languages occasioned by its morphological property. As such, once morphological units have been acquired the language principles work naturally in constraining the language use. Some of the language principles which are innate and part of adult syntactic knowledge are the binding theory principles. Binding theory constrains the use of NPs in languages; there are asymmetrical results, however, on binding theory based research on knowledge of the binding principles among young children cross-linguistically see (Mustafawi & Mahfoudhi, 2005). To investigate the innateness of binding principles among L2 learners; the current study looked at Kenyan form one students who have studied English nominal elements for more than seven years. The aim was to describe knowledge in nominal elements and how the students subconsciously interpret and use the binding principles as guided by the innate linguistic ability. Judgment test was used to elicit data from two different schools an experimental and a controlled one. The experimental school had studied a recommended class reader where an extract was lifted and students given seventeen test questions on nominal elements. Students were also given fifty questions on match and mismatch binding theory sentences (BT sentences hence forth) for interpretation. Lastly, the students wrote essays where BT sentences were extracted from their essays for judgment. Both phrase markers and descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. An Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was carried to point out any significance difference in interpretation of the nominal elements within and between the two groups. The abstract linguistic ability among the form one students was evident from the students’ use of nominal elements in spontaneous essay writing where 70% use of BT sentences was grammatical. Comprehensional skills which precede production skills lead to below chance in identification of nominal elements in context and interpretation of both match and mismatch nominal items in the BT sentences.