The acquisition of English L2 lexical and phrasal plural marking

This study examined the acquisition of English plural marking, i.e. the plural -s marker on nouns without quantifiers (lexical plural marking) and nouns in contexts with quantifiers (phrasal plural marking). It was carried out within the framework of Processability Theory. There were ten participants involved; they were young adult Indonesian learners who learned English as a second language in a formal context. Data collection was carried out at two points in time within one semester, namely at the beginning and the end of the semester. At each point of time, the participants were assigned translation tasks from Indonesian into English. The translation tasks aimed specifically to elicit the targeted morphological structures based on the PT hierarchy. The data were analysed by using distributional analysis; the findings were then examined by means of implicational scaling on the basis of the emergence criterion, the purpose of which is to determine the acquisition points of the morphological forms under scrutiny. The research finding demonstrates that the development of plural marking of the participants follows the sequences as predicted in PT; each participant first acquires plural –s marker on nouns without quantifiers, and then they acquire that marker on nouns with quantifiers.