AN ERROR ANALYSIS ON SUBJECT-VERB AGREEMENT ENCOUNTERED IN THESES

Abstract

Abstract

The objectives of this study are to investigate sorts of error on subject-verb agreement encountered in theses, the error frequency of subject-verb agreement, and the causes of errors of subject-verb agreement. Written language production is the major requirement of a thesis writing. However, sentence types necessarily become the starting points of determination to the correct subject-verb agreement. The research applied a descriptive method with qualitative approach. The data of this research were collected from the corpus of 6 theses submitted to English Language Study Program in Academic Year 2017/2018. The data were manually sorted out by separating subject-verb agreement errors from other types of error. The result showed that there are 6 major forms of subject-verb agreement which comprised 170 errors. Of 6 forms, "3rd singular subject" was the most frequent encountered in theses. In contrast, "double subject" was the least frequent error form. The errors were caused by "interlingual errors" and "intralingual errors".

Keywords: Errors, Subject-verb Agreement, Theses