the acquisition of wh-in-situ constructions in second language acquisition

344 Pages·2009·1.02 MB·English

THE ACQUISITION OF WH-IN-SITU CONSTRUCTIONS IN
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

A Dissertation
submitted to the Faculty of the
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
of Georgetown University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in Linguistics

By

Myong Hee Choi, M.A.

Washington, DC
April 8, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Myong Hee Choi
All Rights Reserved
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THE ACQUISITION OF WH-IN-SITU CONSTRUCTIONS IN
SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

Myong Hee Choi, M.A.

Thesis Advisor: Donna Lardiere, Ph.D.

ABSTRACT

This study investigated the interpretation of wh-in-situ expressions in L2 Korean by
adult native speakers of English. Previous L2 studies within a generative grammar
framework focused on knowledge of constraints on wh-movement in languages such as
English, and attributed non-nativelike outcomes to a failure by learners to select a strong
uninterpretable wh-feature that is argued to parametrically distinguish wh-movement
from wh-in-situ languages (Hawkins & Chan 1997; Hawkins & Hattori 2006). However,
this dissertation argues that such parameter resetting accounts are not sufficient to capture
the nature of the learning problems facing native English speakers acquiring Korean.
In Korean, wh-in-situ words can receive multiple readings. For example, mwues
‘THING’ receives a question reading (‘what’) when it occurs with a question particle, but
it has an obligatory indefinite reading (‘something’) when it co-occurs with rising
intonation in matrix interrogatives or with a declarative particle in embedded clauses.
Thus, Korean wh-expressions are variables which require particular licensing
environments to be interpreted (Aoun & Li 1993).
In this study, 47 native English speakers at high-intermediate and advanced
proficiency levels of L2 Korean were administered two types of translation tasks along
with a truth-value judgment task in order to explore their knowledge of Korean wh-
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expressions according to the contextual co-occurrence of relevant intonation patterns and
sentential particles. The results indicated that English-speaking learners from both
proficiency groups showed statistically better performance on the question reading than
on the indefinite reading in both prosodic and morphological licensing environments. The
incorrect question interpretation declines as development proceeds, but non-targetlike
interpretations persist among several advanced learners.
These findings suggest that the greatest difficulty for adult L2 learners does not reside
in parametric selection, because both L1 and L2 grammars select the relevant features
generating wh-expressions. Instead, the L2 learners whose L1 wh-words are lexicalized
with an operator and a variable together within a single lexical item appear to have
difficulty in reconfiguring these features into a different L2 configuration in which wh-
elements are variables and its licensors are realized on distinct lexical items. This study
implements a Feature-Reassembly approach (Lardiere 2008) to best account for the L2
acquisition data.
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Acknowledgments

While the writing of a dissertation is an individual activity, the following
dissertation benefited from the insights and direction of the members of my committee—
Donna Lardiere (chair), Héctor Campos, Young-Key Kim-Renaud. I am indebted to all
three, and I am very lucky to have committee members who formed a great team with
their contribution of their strengths and expertise to my project. Without their support,
patience, and guidance this dissertation would never have been accomplished.
My dissertation chair, Donna Lardiere exemplifies the high quality scholarship to
which I aspire. As my mentor, Donna has encouraged and helped me in countless ways,
by promoting my development from graduate student into linguist. Knowing her made
my life richer and strengthened my acquisition expertise. I am extremely grateful to
Donna for her extensive discussions and suggestions on the relevant materials and for
standing beside me during my doctoral study at Georgetown.
In appreciation, I would like to acknowledge two other committee members,
Héctor Campos and Young-Key Kim-Renaud, who also patiently guided me through the
dissertation process. They provided insights which challenged my thinking and
substantially improved the finished product. Héctor’s careful, thoughtful reading of the
draft directed me to be more precise concerning my claims. His comments and guidance
have been invaluable in sharpening the content of my work. I am grateful to Young-Key
Kim-Renaud for regularly making time to listen to my ideas. Her enthusiasm,
encouragement, and helpful suggestions regarding Korean data and her pedagogical
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insights made her invaluable to my committee. I appreciate the risk she took on a student
she had never worked with previously.
I have also benefited from fruitful discussions, useful advice, and feedback from
scholars at international conferences such as Generative Approaches to Second Language
Acquisition, Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, and Second Language
Research Forum. For helpful discussion of various issues of linguistics and acquisition
further afield, I would like to express heartfelt gratitude to Laurent Dekydtspotter, Roger
Hawkins, William O’Grady, Bonnie Schwartz, Lydia White, Boping Yuan, among many
others. I acknowledge William O’Grady for valuable comments and kindly making his
child corpus data available and introducing me to the Sejong corpus data.
I extend my gratitude to the L2 participants and their devoted Korean language
instructors at Brigham Young University, Defense Language Institute Foreign Language
Program, Georgetown University, and Seoul National University in my study who
generously offered their time for the experiments. I also thank my native Korean
participants for patiently suffering through numerous pre-pilots and pilots and for serving
as controls.
I would like to thank everyone at the Linguistic Department for their help from
the day I arrived till my graduation at Georgetown University. The best and worst
moments of my dissertation journey have been shared with many acquisitionists and
syntacticians. I would like to thank Jong Un Park and Sun Hee Hwang for their input and
support and Chong Min Lee for helping me to analyze corpus data. A special thanks
goes to Simon Mauck for agreeing to serve as my editor as well as proofreader.
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The last, and surely the most, I want to thank my family for their love, support
and belief in me. I devote this dissertation to them.

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Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Introduction 1
1.1. Why is a Non-parametric Approach Necessary for Adult L2 Acquisition? 3
1.2. Why Study the Interpretation of ‘Wh’-expressions? 8
1.3. Goals and Outline 11
Chapter 2 The Interpretation of Korean Wh-in-situ Expressions 13
2.1. The Movement Analysis of Wh-constructions 15
2.2. Binding Analysis 18
2.2.1. Wh-questions and Korean Sentential Particles 19
2.2.2. The Properties of WH-elements of Korean as Free Variables 23
2.2.3. Multiple Interpretations of Variable Expressions and their Operator Items 26
2.3. Interpretive Environments of Variable Expressions: Matrix Interrogatives 28
2.4. Interpretive Environments of Variable Expressions: Embedded Clauses 34
2.5. Crosslinguistic wh-constructions in English and Korean 43
2.6. Possible Learning Problems 48
2.7. Summary 53
Chapter 3 Parameters and Parameter Setting in SLA 55
3.1. Parameters in the Minimalist Program 56
3.2. Micro-Parameter versus Macro-Parameter Views 61
3.3. What Constitutes Parameters in SLA? 66
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3.3.1. Functional Categories 67
3.3.2. Features 68
3.3.3. Feature Values 69
3.4. SLA Views of Parameter (Re)setting 70
3.5. A Challenge to Parameter Resetting Models: Morphological Variability 74
3.5.1. What is Variability in L2 Grammars? 75
3.5.2. The Issue of Persistent Variability in terms of Parameter Resetting 77
3.5.3. Variability Data in Adult SLA 78
3.5.4. Revisiting L2 Variability 83
3.6. Relevant SLA Approaches? 86
3.6.1. The Full Transfer/Full Access Hypothesis 87
3.6.2. The Representational Deficit Hypothesis 93
3.6.3. An Alternative Account: The Feature-Reassembly Approach 110
3.7. Summary 118
Chapter 4 Data and Methodology 120
4.1. Research Questions 121
4.2. Methodology 121
4.2.1. Materials 122
4.2.2. The Participants 133
4.3. Procedures for Experiment and Data Analysis 135
Chapter 5 Data Analysis: Empirical Results 138
5.1. Results of the Translation Tasks 139
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5.1.1. A Listening-and-translation Task: Prosodic Conditioning 140
5.1.2. A Reading-and-translation Task: Morphological Conditioning 147
5.1.3. Comparing Different Contextual Conditions in Translation Tasks 154
5.2. Results of the Truth Value Judgment Task 162
5.3. Cross-task Comparisons 178
5.4. Summary 182
Chapter 6 Data Analysis: Interpretation and Discussion 184
6.1. Prosodic Factors for the Interpretation of Matrix Variable Expressions 185
6.1.1. Acquiring a [−Strong] Uninterpretable Feature 189
6.1.2. The Incorrect [+Q] Reading of Variable Expressions in Yes/No Contexts 191
6.1.3. Variability in the L2 Learners’ Interpretation: Prosodic Condition 201
6.2. Morphological Factors in the Interpretation of Embedded Variable Expressions203
6.2.1. The Incorrect [+Q] Reading of Variable Expressions in Declarative Contexts
206
6.2.2. L2 Learners’ Performance on the Different Experimental Tasks 213
6.2.3. Variability in the L2 Learners’ Interpretation: Morphological Condition 215
6.3. The Role of Licensor Types 217
6.3.1. The L2 Learners’ Sensitivity to Different Cues 218
6.3.2. Why the [−Q] Interpretation of Variable Expressions in the Question
Contexts? 220
6.4. Summary 226

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