Grammatical Errors in EFL Graffiti

The new developments in today’s life-style and needs have called for a good deal of language change. Due to this reason, language studies often strike fresh grounds. The researcher’s interest in this study is to investigate a language variety used in graffiti writing from multiple perspectives. This paper focuses on the grammar of statements written by non-native English speakers, i.e., Jordanian students learning English as a foreign language. The written English statements of graffiti have been videotaped from English medium schools. The collected data have then been transcribed, coded and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The study demonstrates that Jordanian learners of English as a foreign language when compared to English native speakers have developed a kind of ownership of English that enables them to simplify its grammar by playing with its rules affected by the internet communication, globalization, and SMS texting. The spill-over effect of applying grammatical rules in English on statements of graffiti is, in fact, due to some of these trends. The results reveal that graffiti writers commit additional errors due to mother tongue interference, overgeneralization, conformity with native speakers, and ignorance.


Introduction
The new developments in today's life-style and needs have called for a good deal of language change.Due to this reason, language studies often strike fresh grounds.Linguists and sociolinguists agree that any language contains a number of varieties which have evolved in order to serve different functions in society and to fulfill the needs of their speakers.Quirk (1966, p. 19) maintains that the uses to which language is put are as various as the people and societies that use it.He also maintains that every particular use of language is to some extent reflected in it.Crystal (1988, p. 378), on the other hand, goes as far as saying that the major aims of linguistic studies is the investigation of the factors that give 'promotion' and 'maintenance' to the existence of varieties within a language and providing descriptions of their use.He adds that "these studies have an intrinsic intellectual interest, as they provide a means of observing change in contemporary culture and civilization."Such studies, he adds, can also provide practical assistance when they clarify the reasons behind the use of unfamiliar language, consequently, they may provide a perspective that can be of great help in resolving cases of a transitional linguistic conflict (Crystal, 1988, p. 379).
The major objective of the present study is to investigate some grammatical characteristics of the language of Jordanians' English 'graffiti' and to find out whether this language variety differs from common-core English, on the one hand, and from other varieties, on the other.
The word "graffiti" owes its name to the first method in which it was produced -scratching or carving (Blume, 1985).It is related, both linguistically and in content, with the name of a particular technique of mural painting, that is of 'sgraffito'.The common English usage of the word has actually evolved to include "Pictorial or written inscriptions for which no official provision is made and which is largely unwanted and which are written on the most various publicly acceptable surfaces normally by anonymous individuals (but sometimes by groups)" (Blume, 1985, p. 137).As a matter of fact, the word 'graffiti' is now used to mean any wall writing or pictures or symbols or markings of any kind on any surface anywhere no matter what the motivation of the writer (Dundees, 1966).Graffiti abounds in the world around us, and it is visible on almost every conceivable surface, even on some that defy all logic.It has been around for thousands of years and is not likely to disappear in the foreseeable future.With the bounty of such material to draw on, graffiti has become a logical focus for many scholars from a variety of different disciplines.When some event or problem troubles the community, the anxieties manifest themselves in graffiti.This is the great strength of graffiti research that it enables us to tap into the minds of everyday people and discover people or ideas that may be otherwise silenced.
The recording of graffiti is a perennially popular activity that gives insight into folk culture and folk language (Nilsen, 1980).The 1970s were halcyon days of graffiti research.During this time, researchers from every conceivable discipline were looking at graffiti.This has resulted in a tremendous archive of graffiti data just ripe for analysis.With such a wide variety of research available, it would seem that a system for reviewing or categorizing these texts is badly needed.Graffiti can be approached phonologically, morphologically, syntactically, or semantically, although in many cases all four aspects are noteworthy.It was found that 80% of utterances of graffiti were grammatical, suggesting that the language of graffiti is acceptably learnable and usable for most users (Rosenfield & Stefanie, 2004, p. 81).To meet their objectives, graffitists use a range of vocabulary and grammatical structures in creative contexts.Some of the formal properties of graffiti make them recognizable, although not comprehensible, as English.The language used is quite significant and, as a whole, conforms to a number of important conventions.Some graffitists adapt a familiar language and apply it to new contexts for a variety of purposes, such as evoking an emotive response in the reader.However, some graffiti are a handy reminder that seems to have been born out of some grammatical frustration.Some researchers desire serious scientific research, such as Regina Blume and try to look at graffiti as a model of communication in spite of knowing that, for many, graffiti is merely entertaining.
One characteristic of the texts written on graffiti is the multiplicity of approaches used: cultural, gendered, linguistic, folkloric, quantitative, aesthetic, motivational, preventive, and popularisational.Each of these approaches has benefits and detriments.In fact, this diversity can be strength if used properly, because viewing any subject from varying angles ensures a thorough investigation of all available material.However, without connections between the approaches, such diversity can be daunting and counter-productive.
The language used by graffitists has been compared to another type of communication which Nilsen (1978), in fact, calls doublespeak.Even though the two types being on opposite sides of the establishment fence, both of them resort to the same techniques such as name-calling, glittering generalities, testimonials of famous people, transfer by comparison, card-stacking by leaving out facts, bandwagon jumping, and plain folk associations.
Linguists have been interested in graffiti writing because they find its language to reveal how human language evolves and changes.For example, Claramonte and Alonso (1993) outlined the social significance and categories of wall and desktop graffiti.They also studied peculiar and idiosyncratic spellings and discussed abbreviations, acronyms, clippings, pun, rhyme slang and new word derivation strategies (See also AbuJaber, Yagi & Al-Ghalith, 2012).They have found graffitists of a university background to be linguistically creative.
According to David Crystal (2006), there are various reasons behind graffiti writings.Sometimes, it is used for demonstrating presence and leaving a mark instead of being used for communication.Crystal also noted that the dramatic expansion in linguistic creativity encouraged by the internet has influenced the graffiti written by non-native English speakers.In his book entitled Txtng: The Gr8 Db8 (2008), Crystal has considered at length some of the strategies utilized in texting, many of which have been borrowed wholesale by graffiti writers.He studied the impact that such strategies have on literacy, language and society and explained how to interpret pictograms, logograms, abbreviations, symbols and wordplay.He, in fact, demonstrated how the strategies utilized in texting are very old, tracing some as far back as Leonardo da Vinci, William Camden, Ben Johnson, Lewis Carroll, etc. Obeng (2000a) viewed graffiti as discourse and identified graffiti with properties of interactions, turn-taking, repair, opening and closing, adjacency pairs, and indirectness.In fact, he also observed that graffiti sentences were often short and of the simple sentence type.Obeng (2000b) also studied language attitudes in graffiti writings.The results of his findings showed that the discursive strategies used to express language attitudes in the graffiti written by Ghanian university students include intertextuality, and he noticed, as a matter of fact, that graffitists borrow from previous texts or from public knowledge when creating graffiti.Name-calling, insults, and in-group slang were among the strategies used by the graffiti writers.The linguistic resources used were inclusive and exclusive pronouns, verbs denoting strong emotional valence, repetition of specific syntactic frames, and adjectives of quality.The study also revealed that the graphological strategies included exclamation marks and upper case letters to signal agreement or disagreement.
Solomon and Yager examined the syndrome of the relationship between graffiti writing on a college campus and the authoritarian personality.Their findings revealed that "much of the content… was seen as evidencing release of repressed sexuality or the sort of aggressive and hostile impulses that are said to be authoritarian concerns" (Solomon & Yager, 1975, p. 149).Their discovery also showed that toilet graffiti were significantly more hostile towards out groups and more concerned with sexuality than public area graffiti.
Strong gender differences for graffiti topics were studied by Green (2003).His findings showed that males are more in favour of politics and financial matters, whilst females are more interested in the discussion of rape, religion, and philosophy.The findings also showed that males tend to be more insulting, more racist, and more concerned with self presence than females.On the other hand, females tended to seek more personal advice and to be more concerned with romance.Whereas women liked to discuss sex more than men did, men were more in favour of sex descriptions and homosexuality, and they made more sex requests.The study also showed that men were more concerned with their courses, yet more humorous, but women were surprisingly more concerned with drinking and drugs!With regard to language in Green's study, he did not find but subtle differences between the two genders in language style.
Graffiti writing was also the concern of some social psychologists indeed such as Lowenstine, Ponticos and Paludi.In their research of (1982) they aimed to identify personality and motivational variables that contributed to graffiti written by male and female university student communication in restrooms.Their results have shown that a need for recognition and for relieving boredom were behind their motivation.The researchers asserted that a manifestation of power differences between men and women might be purified in graffiti writing.Most of the students in the study sample, as a matter of fact reported that "people who make inscriptions are humorous and immature.Women, more frequently than men, reported using graffiti as a form for giving and seeking advice for personal problems" (Lowenstine et al, 1982, p. 308).
The focus of this research paper is on a variety of grammatical phenomena which are unique to graffiti written by Jordanian non-native speakers of English.

Data Collection and Analysis
Captivated by the idea of revealing some grammatical features of graffiti written by Jordanian learning English as a foreign language, the researcher collected his data using a video camera.The large corpus of graffiti was videotaped from Arabic-medium and English-medium educational institutions.These educational institutions included primary school, intermediate, high school, and university levels.Then the videotaped material was transcribed and labeled in terms of location, the writer's gender, and writing media.Each collected graffiti statement was entered in one table cell.To facilitate grammatical analysis, the statement was labeled as to whether it was correct or erroneous, native-like or foreign-sounding.Grammatically incorrect statements were then labeled as to type of error and possible cause.

Grammatical Phenomena
Probably the most common association with the word grammar is the word rule.All languages, whether standardized or not, have rules and these rules constitute the grammar of the language.Rules are not airtight formulations, they always have exceptions.While rules may serve a useful purpose, particularly in meeting the security needs of the beginning language learners, it is important to realize that almost every linguistic category or generalization has fuzzy boundaries.Language is "mutable-organic, even; therefore its categories and rules are often non-discrete" (Rutherford, 1987;Larsen-Freeman, 1997).The fact of the matter is that language is both an abstract system and a socially constructed practice even within Standard English.As a social construct, it is fluid, changing as it is used.Since the purpose of this study is to describe what graffitists do in their writings, the descriptive grammar used must reflect the variable performance of its users.
The researcher classified the grammar employed by graffiti writers as popular grammar on the basis of a hunch.If the graffitist made elementary type of errors, the writer was encouraged to label their graffiti statements as erroneous.If, on the other hand, their lexis, collocation, and syntactic structure were of the caliber expected of the competent language speaker, then the grammatical error would not be attributed to incompetence; therefore, it would not be considered erroneous.If this error is evident in English native speaker discourse, then it would be labeled as popular or fad-like.Otherwise it is erroneous use.Grammatical errors that have been identified in our corpus of foreign learners' English graffiti may be classified into five categories: articles, concord, conjunctions, contraction, and nouns and pronouns.
It is by no means easy to identify the actual sources of these errors.Some may blame such English language learner's inadequacy on inappropriate teaching methods.Others may, on the other hand, blame learners themselves for committing those errors.In general, one may speculate on the causes of these errors and attribute them to the following: overgeneralization, ignorance of rule restrictions, incomplete application of rules, and false concept hypothesization.
Here is a detailed description of these errors and an outline of the probable explanation of each type.

Articles
The English articles (i.e., definite the, indefinite a/an as well as the use of no article at all) are part of a larger system of reference and determination.Articles are understandably problematic from a cross-linguistic perspective: most Asian and African languages have no articles.Even those languages that do have articles or article-like morphemes (e.g., French, Spanish, Farsi, the Scandinavian languages, and the Semitic languages) often use these morphemes in ways that differ from English.
Articles are problematic for Arabic speakers, not because their language has no articles but rather because the English article system is not an identical match to that of Arabic.The two systems share some common features and have a number of differences.Graffitists make article errors partly because of native language interference and partly because of rule overgeneralization, total ignorance of rules, complete disregard for writing conventions, pursuit of world trends and the pervasive use of English on the internet.
Despite the fact that articles are important functional structures, they are hardly crucial communication devices, which is supported by the fact that they are dropped in telegraphic exchanges.Thus, unlike content words, function words are generally overlooked by learners when processing language for meaning.
According to Pienemann (1998), the difficulty of the meaning expressed by an article is determined by the novelty and abstractness of the concept, not to mention learners' changing hypotheses about article usage at different stages in inter-language development and the potential influence of the native language which may further complicate the task.It has been proved that the use of the English definite/ indefinite articles is a serious source of difficulty to Arab-speaking students (Kharma, 1981).Al-Fotih (2000) agrees with Kharma and says that errors in the use of the English articles are caused by mother tongue interference because Arabic has only two articles, i.e., the indefinite article zero and the definite article 'the'.In fact, it does not have an indefinite article like 'a(an)' of English.While English requires the use of an article, Arabic shows indefiniteness by not using an article at all.Due to these differences between the two languages, ungrammatical structures are produced.The fact that Arabic does not have a distinct marker for indefiniteness the way English does is probably the cause of learners' deviation from the English language rules.Arab graffitists may be using the zero article with both singular and plural countable nouns, which would certainly reduce the system to a more manageable one.
The definite article is used to introduce unique referents.Some foreign language graffitists failed to recognize this fact as in these examples: 'Freedom king ', 'ShoOoting Star', 'bible', etc.This problem stems from the fact that the Arab graffitists have lower competence in article usage.In particular, graffitists often omit articles where they are needed as in 'ur man' "you are a man", 'flat for rent' "a flat for rent", 'travel to USA' "travel to the USA" or insert them into inappropriate places as in 'what is the wrong?','king of a death', or choose the wrong article as in 'RED IS A OVER RATED COLOUR' "red is an over rated colour", 'an heartbreaker' "a heartbreaker".

Concord
Concord or agreement occurs when one element takes on the morphosyntactic features of another element (Aronoff & Fudamen, 2011).English has no gender nor case in nominals, and no number in adjectives.Thus, concord deals mainly with number agreement between subject and verb, and case agreement in pronouns.
Standard grammatical treatments state that for verbs other than be, number agreement between the subject and verb (concord) poses a problem only in the present tense, where third person singular forms are explicitly inflected while others are not.Given the complexity of the choice, ESL/EFL learners tend to simplify and leave off altogether the third person singular inflection.
Agreement errors may be due to phonological or perceptual factors rather than syntactic or morphological differences.Research shows (Salih, 1989;Safi(as-), 1972) the fact that some learners of English fully understand third person singular ending and can even produce it systematically when they write in English, however, they omit it frequently when they are speaking.One reason for this is that the final /s/ is the only inflection in the present tense and has little communicative utility since the person/number is almost always clear from the subject noun phrase, just as it is with the persons and numbers that do not take any inflection.
It is also possible that the third person marker is omitted in speech when a verb ends with a consonant, thereby a consonantal cluster is formed when 's' is added.It is widely acknowledged (Abbas, 2011;Abushihab, 2010;Arnold, 2009) that consonantal clusters are difficult to pronounce for some language speakers, hence epenthesis, prosthesis, and paragoge.Since the most common syllabic structure in Arabic is CV (Mitchell, 1993), then Arab graffitists of English would perceive English consonantal clusters the way they would pronounce them.
Arab graffitists make concord errors in these cases: 1.When one letter is used to symbolize a singular noun, the graffitist appears to be unaware of the fact that the symbol has to be treated as singular exactly the same as its referent.'(m love y)' or m stands, for example, for Mohammed and y stands for Yara.The following are more demonstrative examples: (tareq lovemoh), (S love L for ever), (odai love adool).
2. Abstract nouns are sometimes treated as plural when they should be treated as singular, for example 'illusion suck'.
3. Singular nouns are sometimes as plural when they should be treated as singular as in 'everybody at the club get TIPSY!'.
4. Dropping the copula as in 'my love for you'.This is probably due to the fact that the graffitist was translating from Arabic since Arabic does not have an equivalent to the English copula in the present tense.The graffitist would have said in Arabic ( ) ‫ﻟﻚ‬ ‫ﺣﺒﻲ‬ 'my love for you'.

Conjunctions
Conjunctions signal the kind of relation between words, phrases, clauses or sentences so as to build a text.Interpretation might be available without the use of conjunctions.They may add little or no propositional content by themselves.The coordinating 'wa ' (and) does not pose problems since it could readily translate into English 'and' or it could be replaced by commas.Arab learners of English tend to assume that wa can always translate as 'and' thus resulting in the production of some incoherent or unacceptable sentences (Al-Batal, 1990).Wa and and are not always used for the same functions.The fact that wa sometimes translatesas zero in English may intensify the problem.The constant use of 'and' may indicate that a large number of Jordanian/Arab EFL learners tend to imitate, probably blindly, the writing style in Arabic.One may argue that such learners have failed to observe that the wa…wa phenomenon in Arabic written discourse is a means for cohesiveness, whereas the and…and phenomenon in English is a sign of foreignness and it often leads to monotony and awkwardness.Arab learners of English use coordination with and significantly more often than non-Arab learners of English.
Arabic and English differ in using these cohesive markers: Arabic uses a small set of conjunctions (basically wa, fa, and thumma) each of which, usually, has multiple meanings/functions to signal the semantic relation between information chunks.English, on the other hand, uses a wide set of conjunctions to indicate the semantic relation that can be expressed by more than one conjunction, aided by a highly developed punctuation system, in addition to other devices.Here is a small sample of conjunction error types.
1. Some Arab graffitists in our corpus missed the conjunctive 'and' possibly as a result of overgeneralization of the rule that when numerating in English, commas are used to separate list items and only the last item would be preceded by the conjunctive and as in 'He has meee, mind, body, soul', 'English, Ryckyy, Deutsch, Espanol, Turkee', 'micheal piccirul, arec younes, bellaem unus, virgi lius'.
2. There are some elliptical graffiti statements where two items are listed in isolation without a conjunctive linking them as in 'Libya Jordan', 'English spanish', 'ToTo MoMo'.This shows incomplete mastery of the English punctuation system and failure to understand the exact semantic function of 'and'.It clearly shows that the graffitists did not know that the absence of the conjunctive makes the first noun in each pair a modifier of the other.

Contraction
A contraction is a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters (Roberts et al, 2005, p. 167).Contraction is the process of taking two free morphemes and making one bound in order to create one morpheme.In short: two words are joined into one.To the native English speaker, contracted and non-contracted forms are semantically equivalent.However, there are certain instances where contraction is not permitted.For example, the sentence, "I'm happy, but she's not," is perfectly grammatical, but "*I'm not happy, but she's," is ungrammatical.Although the contracted and non-contracted forms are semantically equivalent, they differ structurally.
Contraction is an optional procedure where a once-free morpheme becomes "bound," finding a host to which it attaches itself.In the following example, "She's studying," the copula has been reduced from "is" to "s" and as a result, the copula appears to change from a free morpheme to a bound morpheme (Lawson, 2012).
Arab graffitists, as it is clear from the collected data, seem to drop the apostrophe where it must be used.Since the apostrophe does not exist in the Arabic language, Arab learners of English commit the following errors because of their mother tongue interference: 1. Contraction of 'I + auxiliary copula' is the most frequent error as in 'Im hiding in the bathrooom!!', 'Im the cutest hehe', 'U kno Im rich, U kno It bitch'.
2. Contraction of auxiliary is frequent, for example 'shes my bitch'.
3. Contraction of the negative particle especially with modals and verb to do, as in 'I cant stand alone without you ','$Mahmoud Ghezawi& Dont Touch'. 4. Contraction of 'are'.Sometimes graffitists confused 'youare' with 'your' as in 'I'm afraid I'm pathalogical liar… there I said it… your lying'.
The idea of contraction does not exist in Arabic so perhaps this is the reason why Arab graffitists make this mistake.It is also possible that Arab graffitists are following trends in English speaking countries.5.They confuse possessive ('s) with plural (-s) as in 'Teachers locker', 'die hard LAKERS fan!'.

Nouns and Pronouns
Non-native users of English as a foreign language almost always struggle with all aspects of English.Many commit errors in spelling, grammar, and punctuation.This is because there are aspects of English as a foreign language that make it very confusing and utterly difficult for non-native English learners.While writing, Arab graffitists have, in general, to think about all those rules they need to apply, rules that native speakers are supposed to have subconsciously internalized.Therefore, non-native speakers are more prone to committing "systemic" errors; errors that are likely to occur repeatedly and not recognized by the graffitist.Hence, only the researcher or teacher would locate them, the learner would not (Grass & Selinker, 2001).Some of these aspects that have become the source of the most common errors committed by Arab graffitists in nouns and pronouns while using a variety of English as a foreign language are discussed below.
1. Count nouns: It appears that graffitists, like typical Arab EFL learners, do not understand the English rule that count nouns need to be marked for number.In such contexts as, "father of Lion; friend for ever", the graffitist failed to indicate whether 'lion' and 'friend' are singular or plural either because they did not think such marking is essential or being under the influence of Arabic where singular nouns do not require the use of a special article.
2. Reflexive pronouns: In rule overgeneralization, Arab graffitists seem to have extended the rule of possessive construction to the second person reflexive pronoun separating the pronoun 'your' from 'self' as in 'Please respect your self'; 'Practice safe sex and go Fuck your self'.
3. Possessive construction: Arab EFL learning graffitists appear to follow native speaker trends when they write possessive constructions without the apostrophe as in, 'die hard LAKERS fan!'.

Elliptical subject:
In conformity with native speaker trends, Arab graffitists delete the subject of the verb when it is predictable.Usually, the subject is either the first person singular pronoun as in 'miss u'; 'am going to the place where I belong'; 'Remember the necklace?HAHA :) sure do', the second person singular pronoun as in 'need to smoke some maryjane'; or the dummy pronoun as in 'seems to me we have one of two choice human being or human doing, which one are you?'.
5. Slang conditional: Globalism and the pervasive use of English on the internet appear to impact foreign language learners of English in all cultures.Arab graffitists exhibit such influence in their use of the slang conditional as in 'Call me get u wet'.In fact, the idiomaticity reflected in this phrase confirms this trend further.

Conclusion
The major objective of the present study has been to investigate some grammatical characteristics of the language of Jordanians' English 'graffiti' and to find out whether this language variety differs from common-core English, on the one hand, and from other varieties, on the other.
Linguists and sociolinguists agree that any language contains a number of varieties which have evolved in order to serve different functions in society and to fulfill the needs of their speakers.If we were to view English as an international language and the Jordanian variety of English as a legitimate variety of it, then we could be justified in making the claim that it is quite acceptable for Jordanian EFL speakers to make the innovation and aberration that native speakers make as well as innovation and aberration of their own.The major aims of linguistic studies is the investigation of the factors that give 'promotion' and 'maintenance' to the existence of varieties within a language and providing descriptions of their use.They can also provide practical assistance when they clarify the reasons behind the use of unfamiliar language and may provide a perspective that can be of great help in resolving cases of linguistic conflict (Crystal, 1988, p. 379).
This paper has clearly demonstrated that EFL graffitists are not dissimilar from other EFL learners.Like them, their inter-language errors were their native language influences their use of English.They also practice rule overgeneralization in much the same way as would be expected in foreign language acquisition.
A new source of error that was hardly present in pre-internet times is exhibited by foreign language learners imitation of native speakers aberration and rule violation; general trends amongst native speakers cause a significant portion of EFL language errors.
It has been established here that Jordanian graffitists who use English do not escape the influence of their mother tongue and therefore make such inter-language errors as 'sthwrong in this lecture', 'my birthday 25-2-2009'.
They also make rule overgeneralization errors of these type 'He has meee, mind, body, soul','Please respect your self'.
Furthermore, Jordanian graffitists follow native speaker trends and fads when they write 'miss u'; 'am going to the place where I belong'.