MORPHO-SYNTATIC ANALYSIS OF SOLECISMS IN MEMORANDA FROM THE REGISTRY DEPARTMENT OF THE FEDERAL COLLEGE OF EDUCATION (SPECIAL), OYO

Abstract

There is a growing concern about the decline in the quality of English use in Nigeria. Some scholars have investigated the situation at various levels of linguistic analysis in different domains, including tertiary institutions. However, there is a dearth of such exploration regarding official documents from the Federal College of Education (Special), Oyo. It is against the backdrop of this research gap that this paper focuses on morpho-syntactic solecisms in memoranda issued by the Registry Department of the institution with the objectives of identifying, analysing and categorising them.The purposive sampling technique was used to select thirty (30) representative internal memos produced between 2021 and 2023 that were studied. Anchored in Error Analysis, the study identified two hundred and six (206) solecisms, which were grouped in twelve (12) error taxonomies.Findings show that punctuation errors with fifty-three (53, 25%) instances were the most dominant, while fragment/collocational/formulaic error (1, 0.5%) was the least frequent. Additionally, findings reveal that, notwithstanding their error categories, frequencies, and percentages, these errors are linguistically significant because they highlight the poor quality of English observed in memos from the institution in question.