4,311 research outputs found
Study on Chinese English Learners’ Acquisition of Wh-Movement Constraints
Full text linkThis paper mainly investigates Chinese university students’ acquisition of constraints on English Wh-movement, with the aim of providing some evidence of the accessibility of universal grammar (UG) in second language acquisition (SLA). One UG principle, the Subjacency Principle, puts constraints on English Wh-movement and this is the major study point of the present study. The author selects a certain number of Chinese university students as participants and carries out a grammaticality judgment test. Since there does not involve Wh-movement in Chinese language, and Chinese students have no access to the Subjacency Principle during their daily studies, then if it happens that the subjects shows certain degree of obedience to this principle, a conclusion could be drawn that UG is still accessible and operative in SLA. Abroad, numerous linguistic researchers in the field of SLA have done studies concerning the Subjacency Principle, while in China, scarce similar studies have been made. The author firstly checks Chinese participants’ acceptance of grammatical long-distance Wh-movement and their rejection of ungrammatical Wh-movement with violations of the Subjacency principle, with the latter one as the major point. The discussion of the study is focused on the participant’s responses to varying degrees of Subjacency violations. The experimental results show that the Chinese subjects have demonstrated a certain degree of acceptance of the long-distance Wh-movement and of rejection of Subjacency violations. Therefore, the author concludes that UG is still available and operative in SLA, while the extent to which it is accessible still requires to be further studied
Evaluation of folate status by serum and erythrocyte folate levels and dietary folate intake in Taiwanese schoolchildren
No full textEffects of red mold dioscorea on oral carcinogenesis in DMBA-induced hamster animal model
No full textWh-Islands: A View from Correspondence Theory
No full textThis paper discusses a family of restrictions on syntactic extraction, so-called wh-islands. The analysis will be based on the OT syntax model developed in Vogel (2004a,b) which focuses on the correspondence between semantic, syntactic and phonological representations, in the spirit of work by Jackendoff (1997), Williams (2003) and Culicover & Jackendoff (2005). I will argue that the wh-island restriction results from the impossibility to establish a perfect semantics-syntax mapping in the relevant structures. The resulting constraint violations add up to yield the wh-island effect. Exceptions to the wh-island restrictions in English are argued to be prosodically licensed.
Section 2 introduces the model I am using, and presents examples of some accounts of ineffability which I developed elsewhere. That section also introduces the basics of my treatment of wh-movement. Section 3 develops the account of wh-islands. Section 4 discusses the exceptions to the wh-island restriction that we see in English, and extends my account to handle these cases. The OT implementation of this account is presented in Section 5.The definitive version of this paper is published in Modeling Ungrammaticality in Optimality Theory. It is available at https://www.equinoxpub.com/equinox/books/showbook.asp?bkid=212Vogel, R. (2009). Wh-Islands: A View from Correspondence Theory. In C. Rice (Ed.), Ungrammaticality in Optimality Theory. Oakville, CT:Equinox Pub. Ltd, 2009ISBN-13 9781845532154 (published book
The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions
No full textThe current experiment addresses the proposal by Cheng & Rooryk (2000) that wh-in-situ questions in French are marked by an obligatory rising contour, which is the result of an intonation morpheme [Q: ] in C. Twelve native French speakers participated in a production study in which they produced the target interrogatives, along with a range of similar sentences. While most participants were perceived to assign wh-in-situ questions a sentence-final rise, a minority was not. Moreover, the rise associated with wh-in-situ was smaller than the rise exhibited in yes-no questions, which C&R claim to be licensed by the same morpheme. Given that these two results are unexpected under C&R’s account, we conducted a further acoustic analysis of the productions, which revealed that for sentences lacking a sentence-final rise, the the in situ wh-word had an elevated high pitch accent. A statistical analysis shows a negative correlation between the height of the pitch accent assigned to the wh-word and the presence and height of the sentence-final rise, indicating that instead of the sentence-final rise for wh-in-situ questions being optional, it may instead be variable and predictable by focus placed on the wh-word, for discourse reasons. We discuss three possibilities for the status of the intonation morpheme concerning yes-no and wh-questions and the role of information structure in French wh-in-situ questions.Peer reviewed
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