Argument-Adjunct Asymmetry in the Acquisition of Inversion in Wh-Questions by Korean Learners of English  

Oleh:

Lee, Sun-Young

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Language Learning: A Journal of Research in Language Studies (Full Text) vol. 58 no. 3 (Sep. 2008), page 625-663 .
Fulltext: Volume 58, issue 3 (September 2008), p. 625-663.pdf (503.46KB)

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Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/LLE/58 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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This article investigates an argument-adjunct asymmetry in English as a second language (ESL) learners' acquisition of inversion in wh-questions. A generative approach (DeVilliers, 1991; Stromswold, 1990) claims that inversion is acquired earlier in argument wh-questions than in adjunct wh-questions, the asymmetry resulting from their different structural properties. However, 1m input frequency approach (Rowland & Pine, 2000,2003; Rowland, Pine, Lieven, & Theakston, 2005) proposes that individual whword + auxiliary combinations are acquired based on their input frequency, with no argument-adjunct asymmetry being predicted other than as an indirect consequence of a frequency difference. Two studies were conducted: one acquisition study with a grammaticality judgment task and one input study with a corpus analysis of the learners' input sources. The results show that learners are more successful at subject-auxiliary inversion in argument wh-questions than in adjunct wh-questions and that the argument-adjunct asymmetry cannot be traced to input frequency. The results of the studies here run counter to the input frequency account but conform to the prediction of a structure-based generative approach: There exists an argument-adjunct asymmetry in the acquisition of inversion in wh-questions because of the different syntactic properties of two types of wh-phrases.

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