BU CAS LX 400 - Week 4a. UG and L2A - Verb movement

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CAS LX 400 Second Language AcquisitionA wee bit of syntaxA wee bit of syntaxSlide 4Slide 5Auxiliary verbsSlide 7Slide 8Verb movementSlide 10Slide 11Slide 12Interlanguage and UGWhy parameters seem to be a good place to lookSlide 15Setting parametersWhite (1991)Slide 18Slide 19Slide 20Slide 21Slide 22White (1991) resultsResults—judgmentsSlide 25The one-year-later testSlide 27Slide 28Types of inputFloodingFlooding results—preference taskSlide 32Asymmetry?Hawkins et al. (1993)Slide 35Slide 36Slide 37Slide 38How are we doing?ParametersComing upWeek 4a. UG and L2A:Verb movementCAS LX 400Second Language AcquisitionA wee bit of syntax•The parameter of “verb movement” is a little more complicated, so we’ll need to dive into syntax a little bit more.•In English, we have sentences like:–John will not eat lunch.–subject, modal, negation, verb, object.A wee bit of syntax •John will not eat lunch•We will take each of these words to represent a “slot” in the structure of a sentence. That is, there is a place for subjects, for tense (will), for negation (not), for verbs, and for objects.A wee bit of syntax•*Completely Malcolm will not clean his room.•*Malcolm completely will not clean his room.•*Malcolm will completely not clean his room.•Malcolm will not completely clean his room. •*Malcolm will not clean completely his room.•Malcolm will not clean his room completely.•You may remember that adverbs in English can appear in before the verb or after the object.A wee bit of syntax•The reason for this is that the verb and object form a unit (VP) which the adverbs must be “attached to”:•Malcolm will not [VP clean his room ].•So, these kind of adverbs can, in a sense, serve as “landmarks”. Similarly, not and tense and the subject are assumed to be in the same structural position all the time.Auxiliary verbs•But some verbs (in particular, have and be, the “auxiliary verbs”) act different.•Malcolm will not^ [VP have ^ [VP cleaned his room ]] ^.–So we know that have is a real verb here…•Malcolm has not ^ [VP cleaned his room ] ^.–But if there isn’t something “filling up” the tense slot, have shows up in the tense slot (to the left of not and adverbs).Auxiliary verbs•Same goes for be:•The steak will not ^ [VP be ^ [VP eaten ]] ^.•The steak was not ^ [VP eaten ] ^.•What appears to be happening to have and be is that they are placed in the tense slot (unless it’s otherwise filled) instead of in the VP. Another way to look at it is that the auxiliary verb has moved to the tense slot.Auxiliary verbs•That is, we might start out with:•Malcolm [PAST] not [have [cleaned his room]]•In which case, we have this:•Malcolm have+[PAST] not [—[cleaned his room]]•That is…•Malcolm had not cleaned his room.•But if start with:•Malcolm will not [have [cleaned his room]]•We just get:•Malcolm will not have cleaned his room.Verb movement•Turns out this kind of verb movement happens in a lot of languages, sometimes for all verbs…•French is a language of this sort; all (tensed) verbs move to the tense slot.–Jean (ne) mange pas du chocolat.–Jean (n’)est pas bête.•In each case the verb is to the left of negation (pas).•So French has set the V-to-T parameter on, English has set it of (except for be and have).Verb movement•Given that French verbs move to the tense slot, and assuming that VP is the crosslinguistically appropriate place to attach adverbs…–Jean (ne) mange pas [— du chocolat].•We’d imagine that manner adverbs should show up between negation (pas) and the object.Verb movement•And we in fact see this:–In English, you can never have an adverb between the verb and its object.•*John [eats often chocolate].•John often [eats chocolate].–In French, you generally put adverbs between the verb and the object.•Jean mange souvent [— du chocolat].•*Jean souvent [mange du chocolat].Verb movement•This fact that the verb shows up in French to the left both of negation (pas) and to the left of adverbs illustrates a clustering of properties associated with this parameter. Both properties have the same cause.•So if we want to attribute the cause of one to the V-to-T parameter, we should expect to find the other property as well.Interlanguage and UG•When we ask about whether UG drives L2A, we are in effect asking: Are IL grammars constrained by UG?•That is, are people, as they learn a second language, “allowed to” posit rules/constraints in the IL that do not conform to UG, that could not appear in any natural (native) language?Why parameters seem to be a good place to look•One crucial property of the parameters (in the Principles and Parameters model) is that a single setting of the parameter can have effects in several places in the grammar of a language.•Our current example is verb-movement (V to T), which is set to “yes” in French, and is responsible for:–The relative position of negation and the finite verb–The relative position of manner adverbs and the finite verbWhy parameters seem to be a good place to look•So, we can also look for the cluster of effects that are supposed to arise from a single parameter setting.•Is it the case that once a second language learner gets the verb-adverb order right, s/he also gets the verb-negation order right? If only one kind of verb (finite vs. nonfinite) moves to T, is it the finite verb?Setting parameters•In general, we have to say that (full) knowledge of the L2 is going to involve setting the parameters to the appropriate settings for the target language.•But apart from the word order parameter (VO vs. OV), the existing evidence that learners are setting parameters (with the clustering of effects that should be entailed) seems to be lacking.White (1991)•Lydia White at McGill has done a number of studies related to this question, and has found a couple of disconcerting things (despite the fact that she is strongly in favor of the UG-in-L2A hypothesis). Let’s see what she did and what she found.White (1991)•White observes that even sticking to adverbs, there is a small “cluster” of properties tied to the verb raising parameter:•In French (where V moves to T):–S Adv V order is disallowed–S V Adv Obj order is allowed.•In English (where V does not move to T):–S Adv V order is allowed–S V Adv Obj order is disallowed.White (1991)•Given this, it should be sufficient for a learner to learn the


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