Effect of Chain Foot and Island in Relative Clauses in the RT Analysis
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FROM INTRUSIVE TO RESUMPTIVE THE ACQUISITION OF WH-DEPENDENCIES BY BEHDINI LEARNERS OF ENGLISH By Shivan Shlaymoon Toma A thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Second Language Acquisition in the School of Languages, Cultures, and Societies Department of Linguistics and Phonetics The University of Leeds May 2016 Thesis supervisor: Dr Cécile De Cat I confirm that the work submitted is my own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. 2016 The University of Leeds Shivan Shlaymoon Toma ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First and foremost, praises and thanks to God, the Almighty, for having made everything possible and for His showers of blessings throughout my research work to complete this thesis. I have been waiting for this section for so long to express my deepest gratitude to Dr Cecile De Cat, my supervisor, who advised me through all the steps necessary for the completion of this thesis, from designing the structure of the study, collecting data, setting research questions, analyzing data, and discussing the results. Her competence in the field of empirical research and her expertise in statistical analysis were utterly helpful and resolved major doubts in this research. She has also been an encouraging, patient and nice person. I am extremely grateful to the Iraqi Kurdistan Regional Government for sponsoring and funding my studies through the Human Capacity Development Program (HCDP) in Higher Education, which is an ambitious program that aims to develop human capacities in Kurdistan Region in the field of higher education. Special thanks go to Chris Callison and Ed Magin for their exceptional contribution in proofreading my thesis. I am also grateful to Dr Nickolas Bailey for his significant thoughts on the Behdini morphology that were very useful to settle issues related to split-ergativity and case marking. I would also like to express my sincere thanks for the contribution made by my colleagues at the English department - University of Duhok for the help they provided in my fieldwork for my research. I do appreciate the time and efforts they spent in recruiting informants for my data collection. Many thanks are due to the students and other participants taking part in my experiments as well. Faithful thanks go to my family, relatives, and friends for their encouragement, prayers, and support throughout my stay at the UK away from home. I dedicate this work to all of them. Last but not least, I would also want to extend my appreciation to those who could not be mentioned here but played an essential part to inspire me to complete this thesis. iv ABSTRACT The acquisition and development of syntax in L2 learners has been one of the most interesting topics for psycholinguists. The interest arises from the desire to understand how language structure is processed in the minds of the learners and whether this processing is language specific or universal irrespective of the linguistic background of the learners. This dissertation consists of two studies. The first one is a native speaker Judgement Elicitation Task (JET), to ascertain the nature of resumptive pronouns in Behdini and English. 30 Behdini native speakers from Iraqi Kurdistan and 24 English native speakers from the UK and the USA took part in it. It was shown that Behdini features true resumption, but RPs are not truly optional, and they are less marked than in English and subject to complex variability patterns, which appear to be associated with the interaction of split ergativity and the higher subject restriction. The only non-variable case is possessive structures, which show categorical requirement for RPs. English was confirmed to feature intrusive pronouns, which are not grammatical RPs but tend to be used in island constructions to rescue the ungrammaticality. Based on the results of this JET, predictions were designed for the second study. The second study is a self-paced reading task (SPRT), which investigates the acquisition of a syntactic aspect of English wh-structures in Behdini Kurdish- speaking adult learners. It is an attempt to find out how Behdini learners of English learn the distribution of intrusive pronouns and gaps in English islands and wh-structures. It involved reaction time (RT) measurement, in which 34 Behdini learners of English (whose proficiency, measured by cloze test, ranged from 50% (Intermediate) to 92% (Highly Proficient) and 20 English native speakers took part. There were 36 sentences, presented once with a gap and once with a resumptive in randomised order (total: 72). Judgements were on a 4- point scale (ok - ok but difficult to understand - marked - bad). This study assumes a number of SLA theories, including the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli & Dimitrakopoulou, 2007), the Full Transfer Full Access Hypothesis (Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996), and the Variational Model of Language Acquisition (Slabakova, 2008). The study reports that Behdini learners acquired the correct distribution of gaps in most structures, but they over-accepted the RPs even at high proficiency levels. Therefore, RPs were transferred from L1 grammar into the L2 interlanguage. The processing part of the experiment v reports that L2ers were relying on implicit knowledge, rather than explicit knowledge, to make their judgements. Proficiency was observed to have an effect on processing ungrammatical sentences more slowly than grammatical sentences similarly to native speakers. The variational learning hypothesis captures such differences as competition between grammars, i.e. representational (albeit driven by frequency patterns in the input). More proficient learners get more target-like in structures with gaps, so the grammar that licenses them is getting reinforced. The lack of improvement in the rejection of RPs can be captured by complementing the Variational Learning Hypothesis with the Inhibition Hypothesis, which explains such pattern of over-acceptance as a processing effect. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ..................................................................................................................... iv ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS....................................................................................................................... vii LIST OF TABLES ............................................................................................................................... xiii LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................................. xix LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ................................................................................................................ xxi CHAPTER 1 ....................................................................................................................................... 1 INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 The Research Problem .................................................................................................. 1 1.2 Aims of the Research .................................................................................................... 3 1.3 Research Questions ...................................................................................................... 3 1.4 Data Collection .............................................................................................................. 4 1.5 Structure of the Thesis .................................................................................................. 4 CHAPTER 2 ....................................................................................................................................... 6 AN INTRODUCTION TO BEHDINI ...................................................................................................... 6 2.1 Morphology of Behdini ................................................................................................. 7 2.1.1 Argument Structure ................................................................................................... 7 2.1.2 Split-ergativity ............................................................................................................ 9 vii 2.1.3 Case Paradigms ........................................................................................................ 10 2.1.4 Syntactic Patterns .................................................................................................... 22 2.1.5 Morphologically licensed pronoun omission ........................................................... 25 2.2 The Ezafe in Behdini .................................................................................................... 30 2.3 Light Verbs in Behdini ................................................................................................. 32 2.4 Preposition stranding .................................................................................................. 33 CHAPTER 3 ....................................................................................................................................