Second Language Vol.5　May 1, 2006

UG-constrained wh-movement in Japanese learners' English questions
Andrew RADFORD (University of Essex)
& Hideki YOKOTA (Gifu University of Medical Science)

In adult native English, (non-echoic) wh-questions require movement of a wh-expression to the front of the relevant interrogative clause. In long-distance questions, wh-movement can move a wh-expression out of a lower into a higher clause (as in What dress do you think she will wear?). UG principles require wh-movement to involve a local copying operation in which wh-expressions move in a local (successive-cyclic, one-clause-at-a time) fashion to the front of each clause containing them, and movement involves placing a copy of the moved constituent at the front of the relevant clause and then deleting the original. In this paper, we report on elicitation and grammaticality judgment tasks designed to explore the range of structures produced (and judged grammatical) by elementary Japanese Learners of English (= JLE) in contexts where native English speakers use Long-Distance Questions (LDQ). Our findings show that alongside target-like LDQs, the learners in our study produced a range of other types of structure, some of which provide evidence for wh-movement being a local operation (including wh-splitting structures such as What do you think color she likes? where the wh-word what is split from the noun color that it modifies, and the noun color is stranded at the front of the complement clause), and some of which provide evidence for wh-movement being a copying operation (including wh-doubling structures such as What do you think what color she likes? which have a copy of the wh-word what at the front of both the matrix clause and complement clause). Examination of the syntax of the structures produced by the learners in our study leads us to the conclusion that such sentences provide empirical evidence that wh-movement involves a local copying operation in the L2 grammars of the learners in our study, and hence that principles of Universal Grammar constrain the syntactic representations formed by L2 learners.

英語のwh疑問文（問い返し疑問文を除く）では，疑問節の文頭へのwh表現の移動が要求される．また，長距離疑問文においては，What dress do you think she will wear? のように，wh表現がより低い節からより高い節へと移動することが可能なようである．wh移動は，ＵＧの原理によって要求される局所的コピー操作（local copying operation）である．つまり，継続循環的に，一度に1つの節といったように局所的に，wh要素はそれぞれの節頭に移動するが，その移動に際して，移動された構成要素はコピーとして節頭に置かれ，その後コピー元の要素は削除されるのう操作である．本研究は，英語母語話者が長距離疑問文を使用するコンテクストにおいて，初級日本人英語学習者が産出する一連の構造を調べるために行った抽出タスクと文法性判断タスクの報告をする．結果として，学習者は，目標どおりの長距離疑問文とともに他のタイプの構造も産出した．その中には，What do you think color she likes? といったwh分裂（wh-splitting）構造に見られるwh移動の局所的操作の証拠や，What do you think what color she likes?のような主節と従属節の両方の節頭にwhatのコピーを持つ二重wh (wh-doubling)構造といったwh移動が観察された．本研究の被験者である学習者によって産出された統語構造を調べた結果は，L2文法においてもwh移動は局所的コピー操作であるという実証的証拠を提供するものである．したがって，L2学習者が産出する統語表示は，UGの原理によって制約を受けていると結論付けられる．