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The Acquisition of the English Determiner Phrase by Japanese

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The Acquisition of the English Determiner Phrase by Japanese The acquisition of the English determiner phrase by Japanese and Spanish learners of English Neal Snape A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Language and Linguistics Department of Language and Linguistics University of Essex November 2006 i Acknowledgements I am extremely grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding my three years as a full-time Ph.D student. I would not have been able to carry out this research without the scholarship. I would like to express my sincere thanks to my supervisor, Professor Roger Hawkins, for giving me the opportunity to undertake a Ph.D in Applied Linguistics at the University of Essex. He has been supportive, patient, encouraging and above all, available throughout, given that he has a busy schedule to maintain. His supervisions have been extremely helpful in allowing me to guide my research in the direction I wanted to take it. A special thanks goes to Dr. Yan-kit Ingrid Leung for her time and enthusiasm. When I started my research she was kind enough to give me piles of academic papers relevant to my topic, which have been valuable reference material. Over the past three years she has become a very good friend. Further thanks go to the following people; Sonja Eisenbeiss, Andrew Radford, Wyn Johnson, Paula Reimers, Panos Athanasopoulos, Chieko Kuribara, Heather Goad, Ayşe Gürel, Mits Ota, Tania Ionin, Bonnie Schwartz, Mitsuru Hiki, Sean Mahoney and Danijela Trenkic. My thanks extend to all those who I met and chatted with at the various conferences I was fortunate enough to attend. Audiences at postgraduate conferences; University of Durham, University of Reading, University of Cambridge, plus the international conferences; J-SLA 5, GALA 2005, EUROSLA 15, 16, GASLA 08 and GALANA 2. Finally, I wish to thank my dearest wife Atsuko for enduring the last three years. I would have not been able to complete my research without her support. It has been a great opportunity for her to live, study and work in the UK while I have been studying at the University of Essex. It has also given my parents, who have been very supportive throughout, the chance to get to know their daughter-in-law and vice versa. This has been an added bonus of being a full-time Ph.D student living in the UK. ii Abstract The acquisition of articles in English is notoriously difficult for second language (L2) learners of languages without articles. Early studies by Huebner (1985), Parrish (1987) and Thomas (1989) reported omission and substitution errors in their data. Recent accounts of omission of articles in obligatory contexts suggest variously that there is a mapping problem between the morphological or PF component and the syntax (Robertson 2000, White 2003), a representational deficit problem (Kuribara 1999, Hawkins et al in progress) and an inability to represent articles prosodically (Goad & White 2004, 2006). Substitution errors are claimed to be the result of a failure to set an ‘article choice parameter’ appropriately for English (Ionin 2003a, Ionin et al 2004). The current thesis extends this work on L2 English by investigating speakers whose L1s are Japanese and Spanish. Japanese is an article-less language, while Spanish marks definiteness and plural, like English. Specifically, the investigation tests the success of the existing hypotheses in accounting for the performance of these speakers in a series of experimental tasks. Additionally it examines whether a ‘nominal mapping parameter’ proposed by Chierchia (1998a), which determines whether bare NPs in a language are argumental, predicative or of both types, provides insight into L2 learners’ knowledge of the English nominal domain. Results from a grammaticality judgement task, forced choice elicitation tasks and oral/written production tasks show that the Japanese L2 learners can distinguish between countable and uncountable nouns but continue to have difficulties with definite the in plural and mass contexts and with indefinite a in count singular contexts. The results are consistent with the claim that the Japanese and Spanish L2 learners can reset the Nominal Mapping Parameter. Substitution of the for a and a for the was found in the forced choice elicitation tasks, but it is argued that this is not the result of an inability to set an article choice parameter. Rather, it is iii expected given that L2 learners from article-less languages have to 1.) remap features made available by the L1 or via UG to forms in the L2 (Lardiere 2005) and 2.) they lack knowledge about the syntax-pragmatic interface rules (Bos et al 2004, Hopp 2004). Overall, the Spanish L2 learners behaved much more like the native speakers on all the tasks. It is argued that the findings are consistent with the Full Transfer/Partial Access (Hawkins & Chan 1997) and Full Transfer/Full Access (Schwartz & Sprouse 1994, 1996) hypotheses. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................i Abstract ………….........................................................................................................................ii Table of Contents …………………………..…...........................................................................iv Chapter 1. Universal Grammar and L2 acquisition of the nominal domain 1.0 Introduction .................................................................................................................1 1.1. Early studies in L2 acquisition of articles .................................................................2 1.1.1. Parrish (1987) ........................................................................................................3 1.1.2. Thomas (1989).......................................................................................................4 1.1.3. Murphy (1997).......................................................................................................5 1.2. The Nominal Mapping Parameter (NMP) ................................................................6 1.3. The Article Choice Parameter (ACP)........................................................................7 1.4. L1 transfer and access to UG......................................................................................9 1.4.1. No Access ..............................................................................................................9 1.4.2. No Transfer/Full Access........................................................................................9 1.4.3. Partial Transfer/Full Access ................................................................................10 1.4.4. Full Transfer/Partial Access ................................................................................10 1.4.5. Full Transfer/Full Access (FT/FA)......................................................................11 1.4.6. The Fluctuation Hypothesis (FH) ........................................................................12 1.4.7. The Missing Surface Inflection Hypothesis (MSIH)...........................................13 1.4.8. The Morphological Underspecification Hypothesis (MUH)...............................13 1.4.9. The Prosodic Transfer Hypothesis (PTH) ...........................................................14 1.5. Research Hypotheses.................................................................................................14 1.6. Organisation of thesis................................................................................................17 Chapter 2. The nominal domain in English 2.0. Introduction ...............................................................................................................19 2.1. The Nominal Mapping Parameter ...........................................................................22 2.2. The DP hypothesis .....................................................................................................24 2.2.1. N-movement ........................................................................................................26 v 2.3. The licensing function of Determiner and Number in English .............................29 2.3.1. Quantifiers ...........................................................................................................35 2.4. Defining definiteness and specificity ........................................................................39 2.4.1. The Article Choice Parameter .............................................................................41 2.4.2. Definiteness as a grammatical category ..............................................................48 2.5. Distributed Morphology............................................................................................49 2.5.1. Articles as free clitics...........................................................................................51 2.6. Summary of chapter 2...............................................................................................54 Chapter 3. Studies of the L1 acquisition of articles and nouns 3.0. Introduction................................................................................................................55 3.1. The Nominal Mapping Parameter in L1 acquisition .............................................56 3.2. The maturational account of article development in L1 English..........................59 3.3. Full competence accounts of article development in L1 English...........................61 3.3.1. Prosodic structure................................................................................................61
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