CAS LX 400 Second Language Acquisition Week 3a UG and L2A Background principles parameters Universal Grammar We started off talking about the human capacity for language which seems almost necessarily to involve an innate genetically specified component of the human brain that constrains the kinds of languages children can learn and promotes the rapid acquisition of L1 Nearly all of the background motivation for the existence of UG comes from consideration of L1A Universal Grammar and L2A Universal Grammar and L2A This raises a question with respect to L2A namely how much like L1A is it Is UG involved in L2A like it is in L1A Another suggestive observation is that whereas children can learn a second language quickly and successfully adult second language learners have a harder and less successful time indicating some form of sensitive period Is the difference between child and adult L2A tied to the ability to use UG in the acquisition process Immediate concerns L1A is fast effortless and uniformly successful whereas adult L2A seems to be slow effortful and typified by incomplete success If UG is involved why are they different Universal Grammar and L2A Universal Grammar and L2A This all seems to lead to an initial guess that UG the mechanism that prompts the rapid acquisition of L1 is not operative in L2A A caveat We will try to develop a take on UG and related matters and then review and try to interpret some of the experimental results that are out there However not everyone is working with the same concept of UG which makes it even less clear what conclusions people are actually drawing Let s look closer at what UG is and what evidence we can find 1 Principles and Parameters Principles and Parameters Recall that the model of language we re working with is one in which languages are for the most part the same but differ in the settings of certain parameters such as word order This model is called Principles and Parameters and these are the Parameters part English English UG Japanese UG Principles and Parameters The parameters are only a part of the story however these allow us an explanation of a why languages seem to differ in such limited ways and b how children are able to acquire their first language so quickly The other part of the story are the principles The idea is that all languages are systems which have certain properties and obey certain principles the identification of which has been one of the main concerns of formal linguistics Japanese Principles The principles of language are invariant they are the same for all grammars Children do not need to learn these these are part of the genetic endowment Principles and Parameters Principles and Parameters Recall the illustration from before the principles are represented by the shape of the language knowledge only languages with this shape with these principles can be learned as an L1 The parameters are represented by variation within the confines of the shape in the picture the direction of the pinstripes Language A Language B Language A Language B 2 UG and L2A So UG provides the parameters and provides the options for each parameter within the framework of the universal principles Another picture from before The Language Acquisition Device LAD takes the Primary Linguistic Data PLD to determine the settings of the parameters in L1 acquisition We can distinguish this conceptually from the mechanism which converts the speech a child hears into the settings of parameters the Language Acquisition Device LAD LAD PLD In case this seems too easy It is also conceptually possible that the only thing genetically specified is the LAD which sets parameters but is designed to only learn a grammar which has that specific shape This may be what some people have had in mind when they lump the two concepts together and it would be difficult to argue for one view over the other But for now let s try to keep them separate Subjacency Nevertheless the effects of Subjacency can be different in different languages You can t ask a question with the trace inside of English embedded questions complex noun phrases Italian complex noun phrases Japanese wh words don t move there s no trace so in a sense you can t tell These are taken to be parameters of the Subjacency principle Subjacency is always sensitive to islands but languages differ on what the islands are as defined by bounding nodes What are the principles like We ve explored one of the principles before called Subjacency Roughly speaking it governs the association between a wh word at the front of a wh question and its trace or where it was before it was put at the front of the sentence Subjacency says that this association cannot cross the boundaries of islands and is considered to be a principle of grammar provided by UG Structure dependence Another even more fundamental principle is the principle of Structure Dependence Sentences have hierarchical structure A sentence like Mary ate the sandwich has a subject Mary and a verb phrase ate the sandwich the verb phrase has a verb ate and an object the sandwich VP 3 Structure dependence Structure dependence The subject noun Mary can be replaced by much more complicated noun phrases yet in each case they play the same role in the sentence picking out the eater of the sandwich Rules that affect the word order of the sentence always take into account the structure of the sentence The standard example is yes no question formation Mary ate the sandwich The student ate the sandwich The boy on the hill ate the sandwich The woman I met in Newton ate the sandwich The auxiliary is are or modal might will should after the subject is placed before the subject Structure dependence Structure dependence Mary will eat the sandwich Will Mary eat the sandwich The student will eat the sandwich Will the student eat the sandwich The woman I met in Newton will eat the sandwich Will the woman I met in Newton eat the sandwich The point is that all rules respect the structure of the sentence there are no rules which will take the first occurrence of is and put it in the front of the sentence even though such rules might be consistent with a lot of examples of yes no questions Is the cat hungry Is the cat who is scratching at the door hungry Structure dependence Binding Theory 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 So structure dependence is a principle of grammar it is a principle of UG All natural languages obey this principle that is all natural languages have the property of being