A Study Of Asymmetry In The Acquisition Of English Wh-questions By Chinese Speakers

Since the start of the millennium,the focus of generative approaches to second language acquisition has shifted from the accessibility of Universal Grammar to the variation in L2 performance as well as competence.Within the framework of the Minimalist Program,formal features on functional categories,which are believed to be the locus of parametric difference between languages,become the major concern of generative approaches to second language acquisition.L2 variation can be hardly interpreted with the binary parametric approach.Detailed contrastive analysis of feature expressions and their conditioning environments provides a promising perspective for the interpretation of persistent variation in second language acquisition.Against this background the present study investigates second language acquisition of wh-questions by Chinese speakers of English learners with the feature-based contrastive approach.The[uwh*]feature of English interrogative C is checked by moving a wh-word to the Spec of CP while its equivalent in Chinese（[uwh]）is checked by a wh-word in-situ.The[Qu_+AFFIX]feature in English is realized by moving an auxiliary into the head C while the[Qu_-AFFIX]feature in both English and Chinese is realized via a question morpheme（overt/covert）that is base-generated in C.Whether Chinese speakers of English learners can acquire the syntactic representations of these interrogative features in English as well as the conditioning environments for their expression,whether they can acquire the morpholexical forms of those features in English and what might cause the variation and difficulty in acquisition are the major concerns of the present study.Four tasks are involved in the present study to tap the syntactic and morphological competence of Chinese speakers of English learners.The results of the acceptability judgment task and the Chinese to English translation task show that Chinese speakers of English learners can acquire the syntactic representations of English interrogative features and their morpholexical forms.In addition,they can correctly map the[wh]feature and the[uNV]feature of Chinese wh-words onto English wh-words and existential polarity words respectively.However,the results of the grammaticality judgment task and the self-paced reading task reveal that Chinese speakers of English learners suffer prolonged difficulty in acquiring the subtle conditioning environments for interrogative features though they can acquire the same parsing mechanism for filler-gap dependency as native English speakers.All tasks reflect L2 variation as perceived in the asymmetry of acquisition.For Chinese speakers of English learners,the syntactic representation of the[uwh*]feature is easier to acquire than that of the[Qu_±AFFIX]feature and it is easier to acquire in adjunct wh-questions than in argument wh-questions.The syntactic representation of the[Qu_+AFFIX]feature is more difficult to acquire in why-questions than in wh-questions introduced by other wh-words.As for the conditioning environments for feature expression,Chinese speakers of English learners are more sensitive to ungrammatical wh-extractions from relative clause islands and sentential subject islands than from complex noun phrase islands and adjunct islands.They are more sensitive to ungrammatical head movement of 2^nd auxiliary overriding 1^stt auxiliary than that of the embedded auxiliary overriding the matrix auxiliary.Asymmetry is also found in L1 grammar.The syntactic representation of the[uwh*]feature in native English speakers’grammar is much more stable than that of the[Qu_±AFFIX]feature.Their sensitivity to different wh-movement islands follows an asymmetric pattern similar to that of Chinese speakers of English learners.Chinese speakers of English learners can distinguish interrogative wh-words from existential polarity wh-words in most cases,but they sometimes mistakenly interpret existential polarity wh-words as interrogative wh-words,especially when they appear in the licensing condition of“existential polarity wh-words+ma”.Findings of the present study indicate that both feature mapping and feature reassembly can create difficulties for second language acquisition.Features of the same structure may pose asymmetric difficulty in acquisition.Features that are realized via corresponding morpholexical items between L1 and L2 are easier to acquire than those that are realized in different ways.The acquisition of the same feature in different structures may also vary in response to the amount of reassembling task involved.Second language acquisition of the syntactic representations of formal features is influenced by the syntactic behaviors of their morpholexical realizations in L1 so that argument-adjunct asymmetry in Chinese wh-words is transferred into L2 English,and the lowest rate of subject-auxiliary inversion in why-questions may also result from L1 transfer of the IP adjunction strategy applied to the projection of weishenme in Chinese.Conditioning environments for feature expression cause lingering difficulty in second language acquisition possibly because they involve the coordination between syntax and discourse,an external interface that calls for additional processing resources in judgment and interpretation.