Browsing by Author "van Heukelum, Marie-Louise de la Marque"

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    The acquisition of wh-question constructions in Mandarin Chinese by L1 isiXhosa-speaking and L1 English-speaking high school learners
    (Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2016-12) van Heukelum, Marie-Louise de la Marque; Potgieter, Anneke; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. Dept. of General Linguistics.
    ENGLISH ABSTRACT: This study investigates the acquisition of main clause wh-questions in Mandarin Chinese, at an elementary stage of language learning, by first language (L1) Englishand L1 isiXhosa-speaking high school learners. English is termed a “wh-movement” language because the wh-expression moves from its canonical position in the clause into a sentence-initial position. In English, the wh-feature is said to be marked and strong ([uwh*]), resulting in movement of the wh-expression. isiXhosa and Mandarin, however, are both “wh-in-situ” languages because the wh-feature is claimed to be unmarked and weak ([uwh]), resulting in the wh-expression receiving its phonetic spell-out “on site”. According to the Initial Hypothesis of Syntax (IHS; Platzack, 1996), unmarked features are present in a learner’s L1 (and L2/L3) initial state as the “default” features. The [-movement] parameter associated with the selection of the unmarked [uwh] feature results in in-situ wh-question constructions and is claimed to be the first parameter tested against target language (TL) input. Consequently, the acquisition of in-situ wh-questions is expected to be unproblematic. It was tested whether L1 isiXhosa (L2 English L3 Afrikaans) participants would outperform L1 English (L2 Afrikaans) participants on a set of wh-question tasks as a result of facilitative L1 transfer, or whether results would be comparative due to the unmarked [uwh] feature’s early instantiation in the participants’ Mandarin interlanguage grammar. Sentence formation, oral production, grammaticality judgement and sentence translation tasks were administered to 20 participants. Results did not reveal a statistically significant difference between the two groups’ performance, but an analysis of the participants’ errors revealed different patterns indicative of L1 and L2 (or L3) transfer. Both groups failed to fully acquire the correct wh-in-situ structure in Mandarin and transfer from English or Afrikaans was evident, resulting in a close to even split between wh-movement and wh-in-situ structures being produced or rated as grammatical. The two groups’ production/selection of both wh-in-situ and wh-movement questions at an elementary stage of language acquisition suggests that the unmarked [uwh] feature associated with the [-movement] parameter is instantiated in their early TL Stellenbosch University https://scholar.sun.ac.za iii grammars, but that transfer of the [+movement] parameter is still prevalent at this stage. It is predicted that without the necessary morphological competence required to recognise that the marked strong [uwh*] feature of wh-movement languages is not instantiated in Mandarin, variability will persist in the form of transfer from the learners’ previously acquired grammars until Mandarin input is sufficient to eliminate the selection of the [uwh*] feature and application of the [+movement] parameter. This study supports the claim that unmarked features are present in a learner’s initial state. Crucially, however, results indicate that L3/L4 (and, by assumption, L2) acquisition does not only commence with the most economical derivations, but that all other previously acquired linguistic knowledge forms the basis for the learner’s initial hypotheses about the TL grammar. As such, it is claimed that the IHS does not have precedence over cross-linguistic influence. Finally, it is also revealed that, as with child language acquisition, wh-words are acquired in a specific order by adults too, and that this acquisition order is based on the syntactic and semantic complexity of the wh-word in question.