On The Acquisition Of Constraints On Wh-movement By College Students In China

This paper deals with the accessibility of Universal Grammar (UG) in second language acquisition (SLA) through investigating the acquisition of constraints on English wh-movement by college students in China. The constraints concerned here are two UG principles — Subjacency and Empty Category Principle (ECP). In Chinese, wh-questions do not involve wh-movement and so the two principles are not evident. Then if Chinese students show the knowledge of the abstract principles, we can conclude that UG is available to second language learners.The previous studies in this field are mainly concerned with Subjaceny principle, with very few including the investigation of ECP. The present study further explores this issue by investigating both of the principles. For the Subjacency principle, we look at subjects' accuracy in rejecting sentences violating Subjacency and its comparison with that of native speakers and focus on whether the subjects show different sensitivity to different types of Subjacency violation, which can also be the evidence of the operation of Subjacency principle. As for the ECP, we make use of the argument-adjunct asymmetry for which ECP can account. What's investigated here is whether the subjects allow wh-arguments to undergo long-distance movement more often than they do with wh-adjuncts, for it is easier for wh-arguments to get proper government which is required by ECP.The study chooses senior English majors as subjects. Data collected from the experiment are analyzed by the statistical instrument SPSS. The results show that these advanced Chinese learners of English are sensitive to the two constraints put on wh-movement. Therefore, such a conclusion is made that UG is operative in SLA. However, the extent to which UG is accessible in SLA is not clear and needs further studies.