Iraqi EFL Learners' Use of Morphosyntactic Negation استخدام متعلمي اللغة الإنجليزية كلغة أجنبية العراقيين للنفي الصرفي والنحوي

Language is used for communication which serves human needs. It is most normally used in the affirmative mode to express and serve these needs. Yet, the negative mode is also used to indicate denial, contradiction or the non-existence of certain aspects, states or qualities. Sentence negation that affects the meaning of an entire clause is known as syntactic negation. In contrast, negation that affects the meaning of just a single word or phrase by the use of affixes is called morphological negation.
This paper examines students' use of affixes in negation and their performance in the production and recognition of morphological and syntactic negation. Based on students' responses, the study aims at identifying differences and similarities which are measured through comparing students’ recognition and production of the morphosyntactic negation.
A test has been conducted for 40 third-year EFL learners who are required to answer 40 items using Google forms for the purpose of the test.
In view of the results of the study, it has been concluded that students' negation recognition ability is higher than their production one. As for students' recognition and production abilities in the syntactic negation and morphological negation, there has been a considerable difference between the two in favor of the syntactic one.
As far as the choice of negation affixes is concerned, students are unaware of the assimilation rules, because these rules are not sufficiently highlighted to guide students in producing negative forms by using prefixes.