When-questions in second language acquisition  

Oleh:

Park, Hyeson

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Second Language Research (Full Text & ada di PROQUEST) vol. 16 no. 1 (Jan. 2000), page 44 - 76.

Ketersediaan

Perpustakaan PKBB Nomor Panggil: 405/SLR/16 Non-tandon: tidak ada Tandon: 1

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Isi artikel

It has been observed that when-questions are one of the last wh-questions produced by children learning English either as a first language (L1) or as a second language (12). Explanations proposed for the late appearance of when-questions in L1 acquisition have been mostly based on cognitive factors. However, the cognition-based approach to when-questions faces problems in explaining 12 acquisition data, which show that 12 children who are cognitively more mature than L1 children follow the same developmental sequence. In this paper, I propose a possible explanation based on internal linguistic factors. According to En¥ (1987), tense is a referential expression and temporal adverbials are antecedents of tense. I develop En¥'s theory further and propose that in a when-question, tense is a bound variable, which is bound by the quantificational interrogative when. Thus, in order to produce when-questions, children must be at a stage where they understand bound variable readings. According to Roeper and de Villiers (1991), English-speaking children learn a bound variable reading approximately after 36 months, and the learning continues through the kindergarten years. The age at which a bound variable reading first appears corresponds to the point at which when-questions begin to occur. I propose that the complexity of the interaction between the quantificational when and tense, a bound variable, causes the delayed production of when-questions in developing grammars.

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