The Omission of Auxiliaries in English Questions by Arab Learners: Syntactic Transfer, Feature Reassembly, and the Left Periphery

Abstract

This article investigates the omission and incorrect placement of auxiliaries in the English questions produced by Arab learners. The problem is more apparent is form such as *Where he going?, where ‘be’ is absent, and *What you do?, where English do-support is not realized. It also includes incorrect auxiliary placement, as in *Where he is going?, where the auxiliary is pronounced but subject auxiliary inversion does not occurr (Kharma & Hajjaj, 1997; Smith, 2001). Studies of Omani and Saudi learners have reported similar cases involving auxiliary omission, auxiliary replacement, and failure of inversion (Al-Mekhlafi, 2013; Al-Hassaani, 2016; Alqahtani, 2022; Umale, 2011). However, most of these studies concentrate on describing and classifying the errors without explaining in sufficient syntactic details why they continue to occur. Drawing on the Minimalist Program (Chomsky, 1995, 2000), Rizzi’s (1997, 2001) analysis of the left periphery, and Lardiere’s (2009) Feature Reassembly Hypothesis, this article attributes the problem to differences in how English and SA grammatically express interrogative force. Main clause questions in English require an overt auxiliary in complementizer position, while SA, by contrast, can form questions through interrogative particles or wh-fronting without using the English auxiliary style of movement or do-support. Accordingly, Arab learners may transfer the Arabic question configuration into English, which can result in the omission of the auxiliary or its retention below the subject. This article proposes a teaching method based on three stages that make the difference between the two linguistic systems explicit and gives learners controlled and communicative practice of the missing operation.