Semantic and Syntactic Errors of Using but Produced by Thai University Students

Abstract

Although both but and its Thai counterpart แต่ /tɛʹ:/ are coordinators, they consist of different sematic and syntactic features. These differences make Thai university students produce errors when making English compound sentences. A group of 50 Thai university students were asked to answer four items designed to find their semantic and syntactic errors. The results were compared and contrasted in the form of percentage. It is found that the group of Thai university students are more likely to produce syntactic than semantic errors when using but as a coordinator. Most of their errors are more interlingual than intralingual because they result mainly from the students’ faulty partial learning of English, not from their L1 interference.