Generative Approaches to the Acquisition of English by Native Speakers of Japanese [Reprint 2011 ed.] 9783110892468, 9783110176599

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Generative Approaches to the Acquisition of English by Native Speakers of Japanese

W DE G

Studies on Language Acquisition 20

Editor Peter Jordens

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

Generative Approaches to the Acquisition of English by Native Speakers of Japanese

edited by Shigenori Wakabayashi

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York 2003

Mouton de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter G m b H & Co. KG, Berlin.

© Printed on acid-free paper which falls within the guidelines of the ANSI to ensure permanence and durability.

ISBN 3 11 017659 9 Bibliographic

information

published by Die Deutsche

Bibliothek

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© Copyright 2003 by Walter de Gruyter G m b H & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. N o part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover design: Sigurd Wendland, Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Roger Hawkins for reading all the papers in this book and giving us valuable comments. We also thank Hajime Hattori and Koji Suda for their help in completing the editorial work. Also, the editor thanks the Department of Language and Linguistics, University of Essex, for allowing him to finalize this book. The Tokyo Foundation supported his stay at this university, for which we are grateful. The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce copyright material: The MIT Press for Table 1 on page 221; The Japan Society of English Language Education for figures on pages 250, 255, and 256.

Contents

Shigenori Wakabayashi Introduction: What do Japanese learners of English tell us about SLA?

1

I VP structures

15

Shunji Inagaki Japanese learners' acquisition of English motion verbs with goal PPs

17

Makiko Hirakawa Unaccusatives versus passives in L2 English

41

II Functional categories

79

Koji Suda and Shigenori Wakabayashi The acquisition of the nominative and accusative cases In English by Japanese learners at an early stage

81

Tomohifco Shirahata The acquisition of a second language C-system by Japanese learners of English

109

Hiromasa Ohba Pied-piping and stranding in oblique relative clauses in Japanese EFL learners' interlanguage grammars

143

viii

Contents

Chieko Kuribara Is an interlanguage a "possible grammar"?: How Japanese speakers learn CP structures in English

167

III New empirical data

213

Shigenori Wakabayashi and Izumi O/cawara Japanese learners' errors on long distance w/i-questions

215

Yuichi Tomita, Kazuhiko Fukuda and Natsuko Tatsuta N400 in the brain potential responses of second language learners: What ERPs suggest

247

List of contributors

265

Index

267

Introduction: What do Japanese learners of English tell us about SLA? Shigenori Wakabayashi

All of the papers in this volume discuss the acquisition of English by learners who are native speakers of Japanese. Focusing on this narrow range of learners' interlanguage grammars provides at least two important advantages, especially when we adopt generative grammar as the theoretical framework. One advantage is that English and Japanese are typologically distant. These two languages provide a paradigm case for illustrating the values of certain parameters which are often mentioned in introductory textbooks (e.g. Radford 1997). For example, they have different values for the head parameter (English is head first, Japanese is head last), the wA-parameter (English has overt wA-movement, Japanese does not), and the null subject parameter (English does not allow null subjects, Japanese does). These typological differences make it interesting to investigate how Japanese learners acquire English, since this kind of research is likely to reveal aspects of second language acquisition that might not come to light if research were confined to learners whose first language is typologically close to the target language. Another advantage is that both English and Japanese have been investigated intensively within the framework of generative grammar. Although English has received the most attention, Japanese has also been the subject of significant discussion from a very early stage in the development of generative grammar (cf. e.g. Fukui 2001). Hence, second language researchers have a solid theoretical foundation on which to base their discussion of learners' first language and their target language. This makes it possible to discuss their interlanguage grammar, although SLA researchers sometimes

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have to develop further theoretical arguments to compare these grammars (see e.g. Yuan 1997; Hawkins 2001; Wakabayashi 2002). Nevertheless, had it not been for the efforts of theoretical linguists, we would not have been in a position to carry out the research projects described in this volume.

1. Current topics in second language acquisition research One of the most hotly debated topics in current second language research concerns the nature of the initial state of interlanguage (White 2000; Hawkins 2001). What serves as the initial grammar in second language acquisition? Is it UG, the LI, or something else? Intuitively, the LI appears to influence the initial grammar when the two languages are typologically close to each other (although this is not necessarily true; see e.g. Vainikka and YoungScholten 1994; Hawkins 2001; Wakabayashi 2002). But is such influence as strong even when the two languages are as different as Japanese and English? While many researchers have tackled this issue, the problem is still highly controversial. It is possible that our research may lead to insights that cannot be gained when the languages investigated are typologically very similar. Another important topic is that of ultimate attainment in SLA (White and Genesee 1996; White 2000; Hawkins 2001). How far can L2 learners progress? Do they acquire only the knowledge for which the LI grammar serves as the base, and nothing else? Do they acquire knowledge only to the extent to which L2 input provides positive evidence? L2 learners are very unlikely to acquire a grammar that is identical to that of adult native speakers, at least when their LI is typologically distant from the target language (Johnson and Newport 1989). We need to investigate, then, how far they can go, what makes the development possible, and why they do not progress further. The study of Japanese learners of English may shed light on some aspects of these questions. Gregg (1996) argues that SLA research should provide both a theory of what learners have and a theory of how they acquire it.

Introduction

3

He calls the latter a 'transition theory,' which can be understood here to connect the two stages, i.e. the initial stage and the ultimate stage. The relevant question to ask here is how second language learners develop their interlanguage grammar. Is there any 'parameter resetting'? If there is, how does it take place? Are there any 'triggering factors' in SLA? In order to discuss these issues, not only UG constraints but also learning principles, such as the Subset Principle (Berwick 1985), may be relevant. All three types of questions, i.e. the nature of the initial grammar and of the ultimate grammar, and how development takes place, are important topics in SLA research in general, and all the papers in this volume are relevant to them. Among them, Suda and Wakabayashi provide data from learners at a very early stage of development. Their data are from junior high school students, who have rarely been the subject of discussion in this kind of research, since they were assumed not to have reached the stage where relevant questions can be dealt with. However, Suda and Wakabayashi successfully showed that learners can indeed provide us with very interesting data if the task is carefully designed. Shirahata is also interested in the initial stage of development. He collected data longitudinally from four children after their arrival in Canada and Australia. He concentrated on the first several months, and discusses the interlanguage grammar of these children. Other studies in this book collected data mostly from university students and/or students who studied in a country where English is used for daily communication. Kuribara studied learners at a highly advanced level (and others), and hence her research is relevant to our second question, that of ultimate attainment. Inagaki's subjects are also advanced learners. They had spent at least two years in an environment where English is used for daily communication. It is impossible to say whether the participants in Kuribara's and Inagaki's studies have actually reached the end of their development, since we have no decisive test. However, from these studies, it is at least clear that some aspects of English are extremely difficult for Japanese learners, and thus it may at least be possible to predict how far Japanese learners are likely to progress in the acquisition

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of English. Based on this kind of data and a relevant theoretical framework (in our case, generative grammar), it is possible to discuss how far second language learners can progress in general. With regard to the transitional stage(s), all of the papers discuss how L2 learners make progress. Kuribara has collected a wide range of cross-sectional data. She tries to describe how the transition takes place and discusses the nature of interlanguage grammar based on this description. Ohba used an independent measurement of general English proficiency, and selected three groups of participants (81 out of 145 in total) to illustrate the development. Tomita, Fukuda, and Tatsuta also used a standardized test to group their learners. Inagaki compares the data in the current study, from advanced learners, with those in his previous research (Inagaki 2001), which dealt with intermediate learners. Other studies concentrate on more narrowly focused groups of subjects, but certainly refer to how learners make progress. In addition to these general questions in SLA research, there are a number of interesting theoretical questions discussed in this book. In recent developments in generative grammar, such as the Principles and Parameters Theory and the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), morpho-syntactic differences among languages are considered to be associated largely with functional categories (Borer 1984). At the same time, however, it is also clear that the lexical items associated with substantive categories (or lexical categories) exhibit certain differences across languages. If we regard language acquisition as the setting of parameter values or the learning of lexical items and formal features associated with them, it becomes an interesting empirical and theoretical question to investigate which categories (and features) are most difficult to acquire. Although there is no study in this volume which directly addresses this question (which is certainly too large for a single article), the reader is invited to keep this question in mind while reading the studies in this book. Another important issue in SLA research concerns the method of data collection. Crain and Thornton (1998) insist that theoretical considerations should determine the way that data are collected in

Introduction

5

first language acquisition research. In principle, the same considerations apply to second language acquisition research. However, L2 speakers have metalinguistic knowledge of grammar, especially when they have received classroom instruction. In our case, English is, in practice, a compulsory subject in the Japanese educational system, and is taught through grammar-translation methods in almost all junior and senior high schools in Japan. Although the metalinguistic knowledge gained from classroom instruction does not necessarily lead to the construction of a target-like grammar (Schwartz and Gubala-Ryzak 1992; Suda and Wakabayashi, this volume), it is better to use a measurement of linguistic competence which does not allow participants to refer to their metalinguistic knowledge. Some researchers investigate areas which are not usually taught in the classroom. This is a promising strategy, since if one can find such an area, not only can one avoid the problem of metalinguistic knowledge but also it may be possible to investigate the key problem of whether L2 learners acquire aspects of the target grammar that are underdetermined by the input. In this book, Hirakawa, Inagaki, and Kuribara provide examples of this kind. Some researchers, for example Ohba in this volume, use a combination of different tasks. However, if one task suffices to reveal learners' competence, then we may not need to use further tasks. Most of the studies in this volume use only one type of measurement 1 . In this respect, two studies should be referred to here, since their tasks are quite new in SLA research. One is by Tomita, Fukuda and Tatsuta. They used an event-related potentials (ERPs) design, where electrical activity of the brain is measured to investigate the processing of linguistic stimuli. The other is Wakabayashi and Okawara. In order to elicit a specific kind of syntactic structure (in this case, long distance wA-questions where the wA-word is moved out of an embedded sentence), they borrowed a task used by Crain and Thornton (1998). These studies provide an opportunity to consider what the most appropriate data collection method is for a specific research question.

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In the next section, I give an overview of each paper in this volume.

2. Overview of the papers In the first chapter, two studies deal with VP structure. Shunji Inagaki discusses the acquisition of syntactic properties associated with verbs, focusing on the acquisition of motion verbs. There are two kinds of motion verbs, namely manner-of-motion verbs (e.g. walk) and directed motion verbs (e.g. go). In English, both can appear with a prepositional phrase expressing the goal of the motion (e.g. to school). In Japanese, directed motion verbs can appear with such phrases, but manner-of-motion verbs cannot. Data were collected from twenty-seven Japanese learners of English, who had lived for at least two years in an environment where English is used as a means of communication. The results show that these learners have learned that prepositional phrases can appear with both manner-of-motion verbs and directed motion verbs. They also, however, allow some structures which are the translation equivalents to structures in Japanese but are unnatural in English. Inagaki compares his data with the data from less advanced learners in Inagaki (2001), and concludes that it is relatively easy to expand a subset grammar to a superset grammar based on positive evidence, but that it is extremely difficult, if possible at all, to 'delearn' some rules transferred from the LI grammar. In the second paper of this chapter, Makiko Hirakawa discusses the acquisition of the case marking system and the Extended Projection Principle (EPP). She follows Yotsukura (1999), who argues that passives in English do not assign Case and that complement NPs must hence raise to Spec,IP (TP). By contrast, unaccusatives, including be, assign Partitive Case, hence complement NPs can stay in the base position if the EPP is satisfied by there. Moreover, because Partitive Case is assigned to postverbal position, the definiteness effect is observed in the ί/iere-construction, which blocks definite NPs from appearing after the verb (e.g., There arrived a

Introduction

7

man in Colchester vs. * There arrived Miho in Colchester.). On the other hand, in Japanese, there is no definiteness effect, and it is suggested that unaccusatives assign Nominative Case instead, although NPs must remain in the base position with this type of verb. With regard to passives, they do not assign Case and NPs must raise in both English and Japanese. Hirakawa examines data by sentence type and by individual learner, and finds that Japanese learners generally accept the grammatical sentences and reject sentences without preverbal subjects. However, they tend to accept postverbal NP subjects with there even when passives are used. The definiteness effect is problematic even for native speakers, but far more for Japanese learners. She also finds that her learners' behavior was consistent in either accepting or rejecting the ^ r e construction with unaccusatives, and that there is a significant difference between unaccusatives and be verbs. The picture obtained from this study is complicated but suggestive. Some aspects of grammar are much easier to acquire than others, and Japanese learners may make a distinction even where neither the target grammar nor the LI does. The second chapter is concerned with functional categories. Koji Suda and Shigenori Wakabayashi are interested in the acquisition of case, a feature associated with T. They focus on the acquisition of nominative and accusative case observable in the case marking on pronouns by learners who are almost complete beginners. Japanese has two kinds of verbs with regard to case marking on complement DPs. One is stative verbs, which allow both accusative and nominative case marking on the complement DP. The other is non-stative verbs, which allow accusative but not nominative case. Data show that this difference is reflected in some learners' interlanguage grammars. What is more interesting is that some learners allow the use of the accusative form for sentential subjects. This kind of error is also observed in data from children. Suda and Wakabayashi suggest that this is because the functional category Τ does not merge and that the accusative form is used as a default form. Hence, both LI transfer and Ll-like development are observed at a very early stage of the development of the interlan-

8

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guage grammar. Suda and Wakabayashi conclude that neither absence of transfer nor full transfer were supported by the data, contra Vainikka and Young-Scholten (1994) and Schwartz and Sprouse (1994), and that LI transfer is a gradual process along with the construction of functional categories (Wakabayashi 1997, 2002; Hawkins 2001). Tomohiko Shirahata is interested in the availability of functional categories at a very early stage of second language acquisition. This study is different from other studies in this book in three respects: His data are longitudinal, the participants are children, and they are exposed to English in natural environments. Shirahata is interested in the availability of the functional category C, with which certain lexical items are assumed to be associated. He uses spontaneous production data recorded within the first six months from the participants' first exposure to English. Shirahata finds a number of phenomena which suggest that C is projected in their interlanguage grammars, e.g. overt complementizers, inversion of be and modal auxiliary in addition to do support for yes-no questions, and wÄ-question formation. These learners show little LI influence from the very beginning, and Shirahata concludes that there is no LI transfer in the acquisition of the C-system, and that UG is fully available from the beginning of second language acquisition. Hiromasa Ohba also discusses the acquisition of C by Japanese learners of English, focusing on the acquisition of preposition pied-piping and stranding in oblique restrictive relative clauses. He collected data from university students at three levels using a grammaticality judgment task and a sentence manipulation task. The learners exhibited a marked preference for preposition stranding over pied-piping, although they accept both structures as grammatical. This leads Ohba to conclude that these learners acquire preposition stranding guided by UG while their acceptance of pied-piping is no more than a prescriptive artifact. The same conclusion was reached for the first language acquisition of English by McDaniel and McKee (1996) and McDaniel, McKee and Bernstein

Introduction

9

(1998). Comparing his data to these studies and others, Ohba suggests that the learners showed little evidence of LI transfer. Chieko Kuribara is interested in the clustering effects in the acquisition of C. Expecting to find them and evidence of triggering in the data, she carried out a large cross-sectional study using a hundred participants, divided into ten groups according to their TOEFL scores. Based on Fukui (1986), who suggests that Japanese has virtually no functional categories while English has all of them, Kuribara argues that if UG operates in SLA, all morpho-syntactic aspects associated with a given functional category should be acquired almost at the same time. Moreover, if parameter resetting takes place, its effect should appear in these aspects of grammar in a short time. Using statistical methods, she shows that there is neither clustering nor triggering effects in the development. Closer examination of individual learners also supports these claims. Based on this evidence, Kuribara concludes that parameters cannot be reset in second language acquisition. She suggests that second language learners rely on some general cognitive mechanism to process L2 input and output, though this system should be compatible with the principle of UG, since L2 learners use their LI grammar (cf. Bley-Vroman 1990). The last chapter deals with new empirical data. The two papers in this chapter offer valuable suggestions on how to gather data in addition to their contribution to the theoretical aspects of second language acquisition. Because of the typological difference in w/j-movement, the acquisition of wA-questions (and relative clauses) has been an area of intensive research. However, there have been very few studies that have tried to elicit certain wA-questions in oral production. Shigenori Wakabayashi and Izumi Okawara succeeded in eliciting long distance wA-questions adopting Crain and Thornton's (1998) research technique for the study of first language acquisition. Errors include partial movement of wA-words (e.g. Do you think what is in the bag?), doubling of wA-words (e.g. What do you think who is in the bag?), and 'over inversion' (e.g. Who do you think did Mr. Yellow kiss?). In the case of the doubling of wh-words, the wh-

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word at the top of the sentence is always what. This is different from what has been observed in data from children, where other wA-words also appear (see Crain and Thornton 1998: 192). This study encourages SLA researchers to consider how to design an elicitation technique for specific morpho-syntactic properties. Yuichi Tomita, Kazuhiko Fukuda, and Natsuko Tatsuta use a technique from the field of neuroscience. They collect data on event-related potentials (ERPs), where brain activity is measured to investigate processing of linguistic input. ERP data have already been used in other areas of cognitive science, but for practical reasons (largely financial) only a few researchers have used them in second language acquisition research. Tomita, Fukuda and Tatsuta collected data from fourteen learners and two native speakers. The learners were divided into two groups: a higher proficiency group and a lower group. They read sentences which appeared on a computer screen in groups of words with an interval. When a whole sentence had been presented, the participant pressed a button if it was an anomalous sentence. The test materials included sentences that are semantically odd (e.g. Mike listened to Frank's orange about politics). The N400 pattern, which is typically observed among monolinguals when this kind of sentence is given, was also observed among the second language learners. Moreover, there was no significant difference between the higher group and the lower group. This finding is suggestive and the authors discuss its implications.

3. Concluding remarks Even though all the papers in this volume discuss the acquisition of English by Japanese speaking learners, they shed light on many different aspects of learner grammars. The conclusions they reach are far from definitive. Some researchers suggest that LI transfer is pervasive, but others insist it is not. Some suggest that functional categories are available from the very beginning of second lan-

Introduction

11

guage acquisition, others disagree. One author even disagrees with the others that UG operates in second language acquisition. These arguments clearly reflect the current state of SLA research. Even armed with a highly technical theoretical framework, researchers are far from being able to offer a unified general theory to describe the complicated cognitive phenomenon of an L2 grammar. However, without the development of linguistic theory, this kind of debate would not be possible. In fact, it is both natural and welcome that different views are espoused, insofar as they are scientifically testable. As is often the case with empirical research, most of these studies have raised more questions than they have answered. When one problem is solved (or appears to be), further questions always arise. I hope that the questions raised in these studies will stimulate readers to carry out their own research. Hopefully, this book will help you to ask the right questions and to examine those questions based on a relevant theoretical framework, collecting relevant data with a suitable method. Second language acquisition research is still very much in its infancy as a discipline, and there remains much to be discovered.

Notes *

I would like to thank Roger Hawkins and Kevin Gregg for their comments on both my arguments and my English, and Timothy Witherow and Darshan Schmitz for their comments on the English. 1. It is, however, certainly true that no one knows yet which task(s) reflect learners' competence; so using only one task is risky (Kevin Gregg, personal communication, April, 2002).

References Berwick, Robert 1985 The Acquisition of Syntactic Knowledge. (The MIT Press Series in Artificial Intelligence.) Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press.

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Bley-Vroman, Robert 1990 Logical problem of foreign language learning. Linguistic Analysis 20: 3-49. Borer, Hagit 1984 Parametric Syntax: Case Studies in Semitic and Romance Languages. (Studies in Generative Grammar 13.) Dordrecht: Foris. Chomsky, Noam 1995 The Minimalist Program. (Current Studies in Linguistics 28.) Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press. Crain, Stephen and Rosalind Thornton 1998 Investigations in Universal Grammar: A Guide to Experiments on the Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics. Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press. Eubank, Lynn 1994 Optionality and the 'initial state' in L2 development. In: Teun Hoesktra and Bonnie D. Schwartz (eds.), Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar: Papers in Honour of Kenneth Wexler from the 1991 Glow Workshop, 369-388. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 8.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Fukui, Naoki 1986 A theory of category projection and its application. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Linguistics and Philosophy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 2001 Shizen Kagaku tositeno Gengogaku [Linguistics as a Natural Science]. Tokyo: Taishukanshoten. Gregg, Kevin R. 1996 Logical and developmental problems of second language acquisition. In William C. Ritchie, and Tej K. Bhatia (eds.), Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, 49-81. San Diego, C.A.: Academic Press. Hawkins, Roger 2001 Second Language Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Inagaki, Shunji 2001 Motion verbs with goal PPs in L2 acquisition of English and Japanese. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 23: 153-70. Johnson, Jacqueline S. and Elissa L. Newport 1989 Critical period effects in second language learning: The influence of maturational state on the acquisition of ESL. Cognitive Psychology 21: 60-99.

Introduction

13

McDaniel, Dana and Cecile McKee 1996 Children's oblique relatives. In: Andy Stringfellow, Dalia CohanaAmitay, Elizabeth Hughes, and Andrea Zukowski (eds.) Proceedings of the 20th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development 472-482. Somerville, Μ. Α.: Cascadilla Press. McDaniel, Dana, Cecile McKee and July Bernstein 1998 How children's relatives solve a problem for minimalism. Language 74: 308-44. Radford, Andrew 1997 Syntactic Theory and the Structure of English: A Minimalist Approach. (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schwartz, Bonnie D. and Magda Gubala-Ryzak 1992 Learnability and grammar reorganisation in L2A: Against negative evidence causing the unlearning of verb movement. Second Language Research 8: 1-38. Schwartz, Bonnie D. and Rex Sprouse 1994 Word order and nominative case in non-native language acquisition: A longitudinal study of (LI Turkish) German interlanguage. In: Teun Hoesktra and Bonnie D. Schwartz (eds.), Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar: Papers in Honour of Kenneth Wexler from the 1991 Glow Workshop, 317-368. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 8.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Vainikka, Anne and Martha Young-Scholten 1994 Direct access to X'-theory: Evidence from Korean and Turkish adults learning German. In: Teun Hoesktra and Bonnie D. Schwartz (eds.). Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar: Papers in Honour of Kenneth Wexler from the 1991 Glow Workshop, 265-316. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 8.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Wakabayashi, Shigenori 1997 The acquisition of functional categories by learners of English. Ph.D. dissertation, Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge. 2002 The acquisition of non-null subjects in English: A minimalist account. Second Language Research 18: 266-303. White, Lydia 1989 Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 1.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

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Second language acquisition: From initial to final stage. In: John Archibald (ed.), Second Language Acquisition and Linguistic Theory, 130-155. Oxford: Blackwell. White, Lydia and Fred Genesee 1996 How native is near-native? The issue of ultimate attainment in adult second language acquisition. Second Language Research 18: 233-265. Yatsushiro, Kazuko 1999 Case licensing and VP structure. Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Linguistics, University of Connecticut. Yuan, Boping 1997 Asymmetry of null subjects and null objects in Chinese Speakers' L2 English. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 19: 467-497.

I

VP structures

Japanese learners' acquisition motion verbs with goal PPs*

of

English

Shunji Inagaki

1. Introduction Previous work in L2 argument structure suggests a learnability problem in this domain, that is, that LI influence persists when an argument structure in the L2 constitutes a subset of its counterpart in the LI, because no positive evidence will tell the learner that the other possibilities are not allowed in the target grammar (e.g. Inagaki 2001a; Juffs 1996a, 1996b; Sorace 1995; White 1987, 1991). This account in turn predicts that there will be no such problem in the reverse situation, where an L2 argument structure is a superset of its LI equivalent, due to the availability of positive evidence (White 1991). To illustrate, English allows both prepositional and double-object datives as in (1), whereas French allows the former but not the latter as in (2): (1)

a. John gave the book to Mary. b. John gave Mary the book.

(2)

a. Jean a donne le livre ά Marie. b. *Jean a donne Marie le livre.

Thus, French allows a subset of what English allows. White (1987 1991) found that English learners of French, after years of exposure to the L2, still accepted double-object datives like (2b). On the other hand, Mazurkewich (1984) found that French speakers in-

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Shunji Inagaki

creasingly accepted double-object datives as they became more proficient in English. Although the latter prediction—L2 acquisition will not be difficult when an argument structure in the L2 constitutes a superset of its counterpart in the LI—has attracted less attention in L2 argument structure studies (but see Inagaki 2001a; Montrul 2001), it also needs to be tested to show that it is indeed the LI that is at work. In this paper, I explore the latter prediction as well as other learnability issues in the acquisition of motion verbs with goal PPs in English. These constructions have not been explored in much detail in second language acquisition (SLA) research.

2. Motion verbs with goal PPs in English and Japanese There are interesting differences between English and Japanese regarding motion verbs with a prepositional/postpositional phrase (PP) expressing a goal, or goal PP (Ikegami 1981; Talmy 1985; Tsujimura 1994; Yoneyama 1986). English allows both manner-of-motion verbs such as walk and run and directed motion verbs such as go and come to occur with goal PPs as in (3): (3)

a. b. c. d.

John John John John

walked to school. ran into the house. went to school walking. went/came into the house running.

Manner is expressed as a finite manner-of-motion verb in (3a) and (3b) and periphrastically as a participle in (3c) and (3d). In contrast, Japanese does not allow manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs as in (4a) and (4b), only allowing directed motion verbs to occur with goal PPs as in (4c) and (4d).x As in (4c) and (4d), Japanese expresses manner as a "gerund" (Jorden 1987), or the "ie-form", in which the verbal suffix -te is attached to the verb.

Motion verbs with goal PPs

(4)

19

a. Ί*John-ga gakko-ni aruita. John-NOM school-at walked 'John walked to school.' naka-ni hasitta. b. Ί*John-ga ie-no John-NOM house-GEN inside-at ran 'John ran into the house.' gakko-ni c. John-ga arui-te itta. John-NOM walk-GER school-at went 'John went to school walking.' d. John-ga hasit-te ie-no naka-ni John-NOM run-GER house-GEN inside-at itta/haitta. went/entered 'John went into/entered the house running.'

Thus, a wider range of motion verbs occur with goal PPs in English than in Japanese. In other words, regarding these argument structure properties, there is a subset-superset relation between Japanese and English, as illustrated in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Motion verbs with goal PPs in English and Japanese

Inagaki (2001b) provided an analysis of this contrast based on a syntactic approach to argument structure proposed by Hale and Keyser (1993, 1997). Hale and Keyser propose that argument

20

Shunji Inagaki

structure, although lexical in nature, is constrained by general syntactic principles, such as X' theory and the Empty Category Principle (Chomsky 1981), thus calling the level as "l(exical)-syntax," as opposed to "s(entential)-syntax" (Hale and Keyser 1997), syntax in the normal sense of the term. Further, Hale and Keyser (1993) refer to argument structure as "Lexical Relational Structure" (LRS) because they assume that primitive semantic notions such as "cause" and "change of state" derive from the structural relations of lexical categories and their projections and therefore need not be stipulated. Inagaki (2001b) extended Hale and Keyser's approach to the lexicalization of a motion event and proposed that the English-Japanese contrast in this domain follows from different incorporation patterns (Baker 1988) in 1-syntax. In particular, Inagaki proposed that a motion event has the LRS representation in (5). (5)

LRS of a motion event

NP

V' PP Ppath

PP Ppiace

NP

(5) structurally represents a motion event (Talmy 1985), or an event where something moves to somewhere (in some manner), thus undergoing a change of location. The upper Ρ semantically corresponds to the course/route of the motion and the lower Ρ its endpoint. Inagaki proposed that within the LRS of (5), English incorporates Place Ρ into Path Ρ and realizes it as a directional Ρ (to, into, onto), as in (6), whereas Japanese incorporates Path Ρ into V and realizes it as a directed motion verb (iku 'go,' hairu 'enter,' agaru 'go-up'), as in (7).

Motion verbs with goal PPs

(6)

21

Incorporation of Place Ρ into Path Ρ in English (cf. (3b)) VI V'

NP

John

V

PP

run

Ppath ^ P l ^ into

Ppiace

N P

house (7)

Incorporation of Path Ρ into V in Japanese (cf. (4d)) VP NP

V'

John

PP PP

V /N Ppath

hairu 'enter'

NP

ie-no naka 'house-of inside'

Ppiace

ni 'at'

Inagaki's (2001b) analysis further explains why manner-of-motion verbs can appear with goal PPs in English, but not in Japanese (see (3) and (4)). According to Inagaki, in the LRS (5), [Spec, VP] satisfies a predicative requirement of the PP selected by the V. This follows from Hale and Keyser's (1993, 1997) assumption that PP is a predicate and thus requires a 'subject' that it is predicated of to satisfy Full Interpretation (Chomsky 1986), which states that "no uninterpreted, or "superfluous", projections may appear in a well-formed argument structure" (Hale and Keyser 1997: 33). However, unlike Hale and Keyser, who assume every Ρ

22

Shunji Inagaki

is a predicate, Inagaki proposes that only directional Ps (i.e., Ps that include both Path Ρ and Place Ρ in their LRS representations) are a predicate. In particular, he argues that only directional Ps, by virtue of including both Path Ρ and Place P, implicate a change of location, thereby necessitating the presence of two entities, a 'subject' in [Spec, VP] as well as an 'object' as their complement. It follows, then, from Inagaki's proposal that in English, manner-of-motion verbs (e.g., walk) can appear in the LRS of a motion event due to the predicative force of directional Ps (e.g., to), as in (8). (8)

[Spec, VP] licensed (cf. (3a)) VP V'

NP John

PP walk to school

In (8), [Spec, VP] is licensed by the predicative force of the directional Ρ to, thereby satisfying Full Interpretation. In contrast, the Japanese Ρ ni ('at') includes Place P, but not Path P, in its LRS representation and thus is not predicative. Therefore, it cannot license [Spec, VP] in the LRS of a motion event with a manner-of-motion verb (e.g., aruku 'walk'), as in (9). (9) violates Full Interpretation because the Place Ρ ni lacks the predicative force to necessitate [Spec, VP]. 4 In sum, the difference between English and Japanese with respect to the expression of a motion event derives from different incorporation patterns in 1-syntax.

Motion verbs with goal PPs

(9)

23

*[Spec, VP] unlicensed (cf. (4a))

gakko 'school'

3. Motion verbs with goal PPs in L2 acquisition Motion verbs with goal PPs have hardly been explored in SLA. Harley (1989) is a pioneering work in this area. Using a written story-telling task, she found that Grade 6 English students in their seventh year of an French immersion program often produced manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs, such as Le chat a couru ά la maison ('The cat ran to the house'), which are unacceptable in French—a Japanese-type language in this domain (Talmy 1985). Harley attributed the finding to LI transfer but did not discuss it in terms of learnability. Therefore, the following is my interpretation of her data based on learnability considerations. She looked at a situation where the LI (English) constitutes a superset of the L2 (French). The prediction is, then, that English learners will have difficulty learning the impossibility of manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs in French, which is borne out by her results. However, since Harley did not look at the reverse situation and show that French speakers did not have difficulty learning the grammaticality of manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs in English, it is not definitive that English speakers' overgeneralizations were indeed due to the LI.

24

Shunji Inagaki

Inagaki (2001a) was the first study of L2 acquisition of motion verbs with goal PPs which looked at both LI English-L2 Japanese and LI Japanese-L2 English. Using a scaled grammaticality judgment task, he found that advanced English learners of Japanese accepted manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs, which are ungrammatical in Japanese ((4a,b)), and that intermediate Japanese learners of English accepted grammatical manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs in English ((3a,b)). Thus, the results clearly suggest LI influence in this domain: English learners of Japanese were unable to restrict their Ll-based interlanguage grammar due to the lack of positive evidence for the restriction, and Japanese learners of English were able to broaden their Ll-based interlanguage grammar due to the availability of positive evidence such as (3a,b). In addition, there were some other findings in the English study of Inagaki (2001a) that are worth mentioning. Among his test items were tokens of four sentence types in (10). (10)

a. < manner V + PP> John walked to school b. John went to school walking. c. John went to school by walking. d. cmanner V and directed V + PP> John walked and went to school.

(10a) is the form not allowed in Japanese, and forms in (lOb-d) are three possible literal translations of the Japanese pattern in (4c,d) with the te-form. The ie-form has a variety of meanings including manner, means, and temporal sequence (Tamori 1976/77). If the te-form is taken to express manner, then (10b) may be its English equivalent; (10c) and (10d) may be its English equivalents if the ie-form is taken to express means and temporal sequence, respectively. Inagaki found that English native speakers rated (lOb-d) significantly lower than (10a), and (10c) significantly lower than (10b) and (lOd), suggesting that (10b), (10d) and especially (10c)

Motion verbs with goal PPs

25

are fairly unnatural in English. 5 On the other hand, intermediate Japanese learners rated (10a), (10c), and (lOd) equally high, but (10b) lower than the rest. Inagaki suggested that Japanese learners accepted (10c) and (lOd) because they drew a parallel between these forms and the LI pattern ((4c,d)), with English by and and corresponding to Japanese -te. He further speculated that Japanese learners rated (10b) low because they did not associate it with the Japanese pattern and thus had to learn the form solely from the input, which must have contained few relevant tokens, given its marginality.6 Interestingly, as Inagaki (2001a) suggests, these findings raise a new learnability problem to those Japanese learners who assume (10c) and (lOd) are natural in English. That is, it will be difficult for them to recognize that (10c) and (lOd) are in fact unnatural in English, due to lack of clear positive evidence for the unnaturalness. What these intermediate Japanese learners subsequently receive will be few instances of (lOb-d) along with many instances of (10a). However, this type of probabilistic evidence may be too subtle for them to recognize the marginality of (10c) and (lOd) when they start with the assumption that these two forms are as natural as their Japanese equivalents.

4. The present study The present study again investigates learnability issues concerning Japanese learners' acquisition of motion verbs with goal PPs in English. It does so by looking at advanced Japanese learners of English and comparing them to intermediate Japanese learners of English and English native speakers in Inagaki (2001a). The following four hypotheses were formulated for the present study: 1. Advanced Japanese learners will not have difficulty recognizing that "manner V + PP" (John walked to school) is grammatical in English.

26

Shutiji Inagaki

2. Advanced Japanese learners will have difficulty recognizing thai "directed V + PP + by ing" (John went to school by walking) is unnatural in English. 3. Advanced Japanese learners will have difficulty recognizing thai "manner V and directed V + PP" (John walked and went to school) is unnatural in English. 4. Advanced Japanese learners will rate "directed V + PP + ing" (John went to school walking) low. Hypothesis 1 is based on the assumption that positive evidence for "manner V + PP" is available to Japanese learners. This will lead them to acquire the English representation (6), which allows this construction as in (8). Hypotheses 2 and 3 are based on the assumption that once Japanese learners of English assume that "directed V + PP + by ing" and "manner V and directed V + PP" are natural due to LI influence, no positive evidence will clearly tell them that they are in fact unnatural in English. Hypothesis 4 comes from the assumed lack of LI influence on "directed V + PP + ing" and its marginality in English. In the following, results of an experiment are reported, testing these hypotheses.

5. Method 5.1. Participants 27 advanced Japanese learners of English participated in this study. Their biodata are presented in Table 1, which also contains the biodata of intermediate Japanese learners and English native speakers in Inagaki (2001a) for comparison. The advanced Japanese speakers had studied at university in an English-speaking country at least for two years. They started to learn English at junior high school or a cram school in Japan and went to an English-speaking country as adults. Among them were

Motion verbs with goal PPs

27

14 graduate students who were studying in an English-speaking country, 12η university teachers in Japan, and one management consultant. The intermediate Japanese group consisted of 42 freshmen at Osaka Prefecture University majoring in engineering. They started to learn English at junior high school or a cram school in Japan and had studied English formally since then. None of them had stayed in an English speaking country more than a month. The English group consisted of 22 native speakers of English, most of whom were university teachers in Japan. Table 1. Biodata summary of participants in the present study and Inagaki (2001a) Int. Japanese (n=42) Age Range Μ SD Onset age for L2 learning Range Μ SD Age on arrival Range Μ SD Length of stay Range Μ SD

Adv. Japanese ("=27)

18-22 18.98 0.92

25-44 35.70 5.58

12-13 12.48 0.51

10-13 12.19 0.68

—

—

—

—

—

-

17-40 26.78 5.70 2-12 5.69 3.07

English (II=22)

25-54 43.45 7.94 —

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

5.2. Materials A written grammaticality judgment task with pictures, taken from Inagaki (2001a), was used (see the Appendix for an example). In each picture were two objects: The "figure", an object that moves, and the "ground", an object with respect to which the figure moves

28

Shunji Inagaki

(Talmy 1985). For example, in the Appendix, "Sam" was the figure and "house" was the ground. Both the figure and the ground were named in English to make sure that participants were familiar with the vocabulary. There was also an arrow in each picture. Participants were told that the arrow indicated the direction and the endpoint of the motion depicted by the picture. Thus, the picture in the Appendix depicts the situation where Sam walked toward the house and ended up being inside the house. Below each picture were a number of sentences. Participants were asked to judge to what degree each sentence sounds natural as a description of the situation given by the picture. Judgment was given on a 5-point Likert scale (Busch 1993; Turner 1993) ranging from - 2 (completely unnatural) through 0 (not sure) to +2 (completely natural). There were eleven test items consisting of five manner-of-motion verbs, two directed motion verbs, and six goal Ps as (ll). 8 (11)

Manner-of-motion verbs: walk, run, swim, crawl, fly Directed motion verbs: go, enter Prepositions: to, into, onto, under, over, behind

To control for possible ordering effects, the eleven target items were presented in two orders, with about half of the participants taking one version and half the other. There were four target sentence types as in Table 2. Table 2. Sentence types in each item Sentence types 1. manner V + PP: 2. directed V + PP + ing: 3. directed V + PP + by ing: 4. manner V and directed V + PP:

John walked into the house. John went into/entered the house walking. John went into/entered the house by walking. John walked and went into/entered the house.

As mentioned above, in Table 2, "manner V + PP" is the sentence type that is not allowed in Japanese; "directed V + PP + mg", "directed V + PP + by ing", and "manner V and directed V + PP" are

Motion verbs with goalPPs

29

three possible literal translations of the Japanese type (see (4) as well as (10) and explanation therein). Each picture was accompanied by one or two tokens of each sentence type along with a distracter,9 with a total of five to eight sentences. These sentences were randomly ordered within each test item.

6. Results The main results are summarized as follows: 1. Advanced Japanese learners rated "manner V + PP" (John walked to school) the highest of all. 2. Advanced Japanese learners rated "directed V + PP + by ing" (John went to school by walking) and "manner V and directed V + PP" (John walked and went to school) fairly high. 3. Advanced Japanese learners rated "directed V + PP + mg" (John went to school walking) the lowest of all. Table 3 presents the means and standard deviations of the ratings of test sentences by advanced Japanese learners as well as by intermediate Japanese learners and English native speakers in Inagaki (2001a) for comparison. Table 3. Means and Standard Deviations of Ratings by Intermediate and Avanced Japanese Learners and Native Speakers sentence type

manner V+PP

directed V+ PP+ing

Int. Japanese Adv. Japanese Native speakers

1.24 (0.54) 1.63 (0.29) 1.92 (0.16)

-0.22 (1.18) 0.24 (1.61) 0.36 (0.55)

directed V+PP +by ing 1.13 (0.78) 0.87 (0.93) -0.51 (0.99)

Manner V and directed V+PP 0.97 (1.01) 1.19 (0.75) 0.40 (1.10)

30

Shunji Inagaki

The results of advanced Japanese learners are visually represented in Figure 2 along with those of intermediate Japanese learners and native speakers in Inagaki (2001a).

!Λ

60 e ** 2 c

£

manner V + PP directed V + PP + ing directed V + PP + by ing manner V and directed V + PP -2

Int. Japanese

Adv. Japanese

Native speakers

Figure 2. Mean Ratings by Intermediate and Advanced Japanese Learners and Native Speakers

Figure 2 indicates that the advanced Japanese group followed much the same pattern as the intermediate Japanese group in accepting "manner V + PP" (John walked to school), "directed V + PP + by ing" (John went to school by walking), "manner V and directed V + PP" (John walked and went to school) but not "directed V + PP + ing" (John went to school walking). This is confirmed by a 2-way repeated measures ANOVA including proficiency (intermediate/advanced) and sentence type (manner V + PP/directed V + PP + zTig/directed V + PP + by ing/manner V and directed V + PP) as independent variables. It showed no significant interaction between proficiency and sentence type, F(3, 201) = 2.06, ρ = .11. The only difference, if any, between the advanced and the intermediate Japanese groups was that the former rated "manner V + PP" higher than the latter (1.63 vs. 1.24). This is confirmed by the results of planned comparisons of the ratings of each sentence type by the

Motion verbs with goal PPs

31

advanced Japanese group as compared to those by the intermediate Japanese and native speaker groups in Inagaki (2001a), as in Table 4. Table 4 shows that advanced Japanese learners rated different types of sentences in the same way as intermediate Japanese learners except that they rated "manner V + PP" significantly higher than "directed V + PP + by ingand that the difference between their ratings of "manner V + PP" and "manner V and directed V + PP" approached significance. Table 4. Results of Planned Comparisons Int. Japanese manner V + PP vs. directed V + PP + ing F Ρ manner V + PP vs. directed V + PP + by ing F Ρ manner V + PP vs. manner V and directed V + PP F Ρ directed V + PP + ing vs. directed V + PP + by ing F Ρ directed V + PP + ing vs. manner V and directed V + PP F Ρ directed V + PP + by ing vs. manner V and directed V + PP F Ρ

56.74*

.0001

.36 .55

Adv. Japanese

29.42*

Native speakers

48.66*

.0001

.0001

8.87* .0039

118.96* .0001

1.94 .17

2.99 .088

46.63* .0001

48.09* .0001

5.98* .017

15.45*

37.70* .0001

13.66* .0004

.63 .43

1.56 .21

.0002

.02 .88

16.64* .0001 Int. Japanese df= 1, 41; Adv. Japanese df= 1, 26; English df= 1, 21. *p < .05.

32

Shurtji Inagaki

In sum, similar to intermediate Japanese learners in Inagaki (2001a), advanced Japanese learners accepted "directed V + PP + by ing", "manner V and directed V + PP" and, to a greater extent, "manner V + PP", but not "directed V + PP + ing\

7. Discussion Hypothesis 1 was supported. Advanced Japanese learners accepted "manner V + PP" (John walked to school). This suggests that Japanese speakers can learn such forms, which are not allowed in the LI, because they are available as positive evidence. They can acquire the L2 representation in (6) from it and add this new construction to their interlanguage grammar. In addition, the advanced Japanese group rated "manner V + PP" higher than the intermediate Japanese group in Inagaki (2001a). This is presumably because Japanese learners' acceptance of this form becomes stronger as they progress from intermediate to advanced levels due to further exposure to this type of sentences. Hypotheses 2 and 3 are supported. Advanced Japanese learners were similar to intermediate Japanese learners in accepting "directed V + PP + by ing" (John went to school by walking) and "manner V and directed V + PP" (John walked and went to school) to a greater extent than English native speakers. This suggests that having earlier made the assumption that "directed V + PP + by ing" and "manner V and directed V + PP" were natural as L2 equivalents of their LI form, advanced Japanese learners failed to recognize that they were in fact unnatural in English, due to the lack of clear positive evidence for the unnaturalness. Especially problematic is "directed V + PP + by ing" since it is particularly unnatural in English as indicated by native speakers' low rating of it (-0.51). 10 Hypothesis 4 was supported. Similar to intermediate Japanese learners, advanced Japanese learners rated "directed V + PP + mg" (John went to school walking) the lowest. I speculate that advanced Japanese learners were not sure about the acceptability of this form

Motion verbs with goal PPs

33

because, not associating it with their LI form, they had to learn it solely from the input, which would have contained few tokens of it given its marginality in English (as reflected in native speakers' low rating of it). To summarize, advanced Japanese learners of English did not have difficulty recognizing the grammaticality of "manner V + PP" due to the availability of positive evidence. They had difficulty recognizing that what they regarded as the English equivalents of the Japanese pattern ("directed V + PP + by ing* and "manner V and directed V + PP") were unnatural in English, due to the lack of clear positive evidence. They were uncertain about the status of "directed V + PP + ing" because neither the input nor their LI provided a basis for its acceptability. In general, the results of the present study indicate the importance of how the LI compares to the L2 as well as the nature of the input in L2 acquisition of argument structure. Specifically, Japanese learners' success in acquiring English manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs provides support for the claim that L2 acquisition of argument structure is not difficult when the L2 is a superset of the LI, due to the availability of positive evidence. Furthermore, the present study suggests that learnability considerations can be extended to situations where L2 equivalents of LI patterns are unnatural, but not necessarily ungrammatical, by showing how the lack of positive evidence could have led advanced Japanese learners to persist in "directed V + PP + by ing" and "manner V and directed V + PP". It has yet to be demonstrated how pervasive such situations are and how such a finding fits into the general theory of SLA. However, it would be interesting, at least from a pedagogical point of view, to see whether negative evidence could help L2 learners get rid of those unnatural constructions that would be difficult to remove on the basis of positive evidence alone. Finally, assuming Inagaki's (2001b) analysis that the target structure derives from lexical properties that are constrained by UG, the results of the present study are relevant to the role of UG in SLA (White 1996). In particular, Japanese learners' success in acquiring the 1-syntactic representation (6) that does not exist in the

34

Shunji Inagaki

LI is consistent with the view that UG is still available in SLA. Previously, Inagaki (2001a) found that in the reverse situation, English speakers overgeneralized manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs to Japanese, suggesting that they were stuck in the LI representation (6), due to the lack of positive evidence for the L2 representation (7). Thus, these results combined, both UG and the LI seem to be involved in the construction of an interlanguage grammar, supporting pro-UG positions that emphasize LI transfer (e.g., Schwartz and Sprouse 1994; White 1989), but not those that trivialize it (e.g., Epstein, Flynn and Martohardjono 1996).

Appendix Example test item

1. Sam entered the house by walking. 2.

Sam walked aod went into the home.

3.

Sam want into the houae by walking.

4.

Saa went into the house walking.

3.

Sam walked in the bouse for 5 minute«.

6.

Sam entered the house walking.

7. Sam walked and entered the beute. 8. Sam walked into the house.

Notes * This research was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Advanced Scientific Research from Osaka Prefecture University and a Grant-in-Aid for Encouragement of Young Scientists from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Sci-

Motion verbs with goal PPs

35

ence (No. 13710310), for which I am grateful. Portions of this paper were presented at the Second Language Research Forum, Minneapolis, September 1999. Special thanks go to Lydia White, Shigenori Wakabayashi, Tomohiko Shirahata, and Yuichi Tomita for their insightful comments and Shu-chun Huang for her help in collecting data. However, any errors are mine. 1. The abbreviations used in the examples throughout this paper are: NOM = nominative Case-marker; GEN = genitive Case-marker; GER = gerund; TOP = topic-marker. 2. The LRS in (5) is simpler than the LRS given in Inagaki (2001b), where Path Ρ was further decomposed into relational Path Ρ and Path P, and Place Ρ into relational Place Ν and Place P. This simplification is immaterial to this paper. 3. As in (7), Inagaki (2001b) assumes that the Japanese Ρ ni is a Place Ρ because while expressing a goal when selected by a directed motion verb (iku 'go', hairu 'enter'), it expresses a location when selected by a stative verb (iru 'be', sunde-iru 'live'), as in (i). (i)

John-wa Tokyo-ni iru/sunde-iru. John-TOP Tokyo-at be/living-be 'John is/lives in Tokyo.'

Thus, Inagaki suggests that ni denotes a place, which could be interpreted as a goal or a location depending on the nature of the verb selecting it. 4. Inagaki's (2001b) analysis further explains why the Japanese Ρ made ('up to') exceptionally appears with manner-of-motion verbs and causes them unaccusative mismatches (Tsujimura 1994) (see Inagaki 2001b, for details). 5. Inagaki (2001a) suggested that the unnaturalness might be due to the fact that, as Talmy (1985: 62) points out, English-type language expresses a manner of motion in the verb root "in its most characteristic expression of Motion", where characteristic means colloquial, frequent, and pervasive. In Inagaki (2001a), participants were asked to judge how natural each sentence sounded and thus it is not surprising that English speakers found "manner V + PP" more natural than the other forms. As for why English speakers rated "directed V + PP + by ing" lowest of all, Inagaki speculated that since by expresses a means of motion, as in John went to Tokyo by car/train/bus, it might not be appropriate for expressing a manner of motion such as walking and swimming (see Inagaki 2001a, for further discussion of the low ratings of these forms). 6. It is not quite clear to me why Japanese speakers associated -te with by and and, but not with -ing in (10b). One possible explanation would be that when transfer takes place, the resulting interlanguage prefers free morphemes (by, and) over bound morphemes (-ing) (cf. Andersen 1983).

36

Shunji Inagaki

7. All but four of them also reported their TOEFL scores, which ranged from 510 to 652 (M=591.65, S£>=39.56). However, the TOEFL scores should be treated with caution because all of them were at least two years old (M=8.70, SD=437) and the participants had studied at an English-speaking university at least for two years after they took the TOEFL. Thus, if anything, the scores would underestimate their proficiency. 8. In fact, there was one more target item with the verb fly and the Ρ to, which was eliminated from the analysis in both Inagaki (2001a) and this study. This was because in the Japanese study reported in Inagaki (2001a), Japanese speakers for some reason accepted the Japanese counterpart of this item ni tobu ('fly to'). Clearly, there is no point in including this item, since there is no English-Japanese contrast in this case. 9. The distracter was a sentence containing a manner-of-motion verb with a locational PP and the adverbial for 5 minutes (e.g., Sam walked in the house for 5 minutes), which was unacceptable because of its mismatch to the directional context given by the picture (see the Appendix). 10.Tomohiko Shirahata (personal communication, December 2000) suspects that Japanese speakers' acceptance of "directed V + PP + by ing" was due to not LI influence, but overgeneralization induced by classroom instruction. He suggests that English instruction in junior high school in Japan explicitly and repeatedly teaches the pattern "to go somewhere by bicycle/bus/train/airplane, etc.", which will in turn lead the learner to accept "to go somewhere by walking/running/swimming, etc." A way to confirm that the results were indeed due to LI influence is to add another group of learners whose LI is like English in allowing manner-of-motion verbs with goal PPs, such as German and Modern Hebrew (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995: 183; Talmy 1985), but who are at the same (or a lower) proficiency level and have received the same kind of instruction. I predict that unlike Japanese speakers, they will not accept "directed V + PP + by ing", whereas if it were an effect of instruction, they should accept it like Japanese speakers. I leave this to further research.

References Andersen, Roger W 1983 Transfer to somewhere. In: Susan Gass and Larry Selinker (eds.) Language Transfer in Language Learning, 177-201. Rowley, M.A.: Newbury House. Baker, Mark 1988 Incorporation: A Theory of Grammatical Function Changing. Chicago: University Chicago Press.

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Busch, Michael 1993 Using Likert Scales in L2 research: A researcher comments.... TESOL Quarterly 27: 33-736. Chomsky, Noam 1981 Lectures on Government and Binding: The Pisa Lectures. (Studies in Generative Grammar 9.) Dordrecht: Foris. 1986 Knowledge of Language: Its Nature, Origin, and Use. (Books in the Convergence Series.) New York: Praeger. Epstein, Samuel D., Suzanne Flynn and Gita Martohardjono 1996 Second language acquisition: Theoretical and experimental issues in contemporary research. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 19: 667-758. Hale, Kenneth and Jay Keyser 1993 On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations. In: Ken Hale and Jay Keyser (eds.), The View from Building 20: Essays in Linguistics in Honor ofSylvain Bromberger, 53-109. Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press. 1997 On the complex nature of simple predicators. In: Alex Alsina, Joan Bresnan and Peter Sells (eds.), Complex Predicates, 29-65. Stanford, C.A.: Center for the Study of Language and Information. Harley, Birgit 1989 Transfer in the written compositions of French immersion students. In: Hans W. Dechert and Manfred Raupach (eds.), Transfer in Language Production, 3-19. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex. Ikegami, Yoshihiko 1981 'Suru' to 'Naru' no Gengogaku [Linguistics of 'Do' and 'Become']. Tokyo: Taishukan. Inagaki, Shunji 2001a Motion verbs with goal PPs in L2 acquisition of English and Japanese. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 23: 153-170. 2001b Motion verbs with locational/directional PPs in English and Japanese. McGill Working Papers in Linguistics 15: 37-79. Jorden, Eleanor 1987 Japanese: The Spoken Language. Part 1. New Haven: Yale University Press. Juffs, Alan 1996a Learnability and the Lexicon: Theories and Second Language Acquisition Research. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 12.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1996b Semantics-syntax correspondences in second language acquisition. Second Language Research 12: 177-221.

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Levin, Beth and Malka Rappaport Hovav 1995 Unaccusativity: At the Syntax-Lexical Semantics Interface. (Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 26.) Cambridge, M.A.: MIT Press. Mazurkewich, Irene 1984 The acquisition of the dative alternation by second language learners and linguistic theory. Language Learning 34: 91-109. Montrul, Silvina 2001 Agentive verbs of manner of motion in Spanish and English as second languages. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 23: 171-207. Sorace, Antonella 1995 Acquiring linking rules and argument structures in a second language: The unaccusative/unergative distinction. In: Lynn Eubank, Larry Selinker and Mike Sharwood Smith (eds.), The Current State of Inter language: Studies in Honor of William E. Rutherford, 153-175. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Schwartz, Bonnie D. and Rex A. Sprouse 1994 Word order and Nominative Case in non-native language acquisition: A longitudinal study of (LI Turkish) German interlanguage. In: Teun Hoekstra and Bonnie D. Schwartz (eds.), Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar: Papers in Honour of Kenneth Wexler from the 1991 Glow Workshop, 315-368. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 8.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Talmy, Leonard 1985 Lexicalization patterns: Semantic structure in lexical forms. In: Tim Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description. Vol. 3: Grammatical categories and the lexicon, 57-149. New York: Cambridge University Press. Tamori, Ikuhiro 1976/77 The semantics and syntax of the Japanese gerundive and infinitive conjunctions. Papers in Japanese Linguistics 5: 307-360. Tsujimura, Natsuko 1994 Unaccusative mismatches and resultatives in Japanese. In: Masatoshi Koizumi and Hiroyuki Ura (eds.), MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 24: Formal Approaches to Japanese Linguistics 1, 335-354. Cambridge, M.A.: MITWP. Turner, Jean 1993 Using Likert Scales in L2 research: Another researcher comments .... TESOL Quarterly 27: 736-739.

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White, Lydia 1987 Markedness and second language acquisition: The question of transfer. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 9: 261-286. 1989 Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition. (Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 1.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1991 Argument structure in second language acquisition. French Language Studies 1: 189-207. 1996 The tale of the ugly ducking (or the coming of age of second language acquisition research). Andy Stringfellow, Dalia Cahana-Amitay, Elizabeth Hughes, and Andrea Zukowski (eds.), Proceedings of the 20th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, 1-17. Somerville, M.A.: Cascadilla Press. Yoneyama, Mitsuaki 1986 Motion verbs in conceptual semantics. Bulletin of the Faculty of Humanities 22: 1-15. Seikei University, Tokyo.

Unaccusatives versus passives in L2 English* Makiko Hirakawa

1. Introduction It has been proposed that subjects of unaccusative and passive verbs are internal arguments of these verbs (cf., the Unaccusative Hypothesis; Perlmutter 1978; Burzio 1986; Kageyama 1993, etc.). That is, surface subjects of these verbs originate in the direct object position. Hence, they contrast with subjects of transitive and unergative verbs, which are external arguments. It has been generally assumed that passive verbs have no Case licensing ability so that their arguments raise (Burzio 1986; Baker, Johnson and Roberts 1989). This is true of both English and Japanese. However, it has been argued that there are differences between English and Japanese in terms of Case licensed by unaccusative verbs. According to Yatsushiro (1999), Japanese unaccusative verbs license structural nominative Case of their complements overtly in the base position, whereas English unaccusatives optionally license inherent partitive Case of their complements (cf., Belletti 1998; Lasnik 1992). In consequence, (i) the arguments of English unaccusatives raise optionally, whereas those of Japanese unaccusatives obligatorily remain in the base-generated position, (ii) the definiteness effect is observed in English unaccusatives, whereas no such effect is observed in Japanese unaccusatives. In addition, English possesses expletives such as there, while Japanese does not. Yatsushiro attributes this difference to the fact that the Determiner (D)-feature of Tense (T), which is responsible for the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) effect (see Section 2), is strong in English, while it is weak in Japanese. Consequently, (iii) the specifier position of Tense Phrase (Spec of TP) has to be filled overtly in English but it

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can be left empty in Japanese. Yatsushiro argues that the property (iii) also explains why the arguments of Japanese unaccusatives remain in-situ with an empty subject position. This paper reports on an experimental study which examines whether Japanese speakers know Case licensing mechanisms of unaccusative and passive verbs in L2 English, including properties (i)~(iii). It is hypothesized that it will be easier for learners to acquire the properties where the LI and L2 behave similarly, but that it will be difficult to acquire the L2 properties which differ from those in the LI. Therefore, the properties associated with the passive construction should be acquired earlier than those associated with the unaccusative construction. The rest of the paper is organized as follows. In section 2,1 will outline the unaccusative and passive constructions in English and Japanese, focusing on the Case licensing mechanism proposed by Yatsushiro (1999). Section 3 reviews previous studies on L2 unaccusative verbs. Yuan (1996) will be focused since it dealt with the issues of definiteness effect and partitive Case assignment in investigating the acquisition of Chinese by English speakers. Section 4 presents details of an experimental study which investigated the acquisition of L2 English by Japanese speakers. Finally, section 5 summarizes the paper.

2. Passive and unaccusative constructions in English and Japanese This section reviews the work of Yatsushiro (1999). In the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995), it is proposed that nominative Case is licensed by Tense. Yatsushiro (1999) however argues that nominative Case can be licensed not only by Tense after a Determiner Phrase (DP) raises to the Spec of TP, but also by verbs which have not raised to T. In particular, she argues that subjects of transitive, unergative, and passive verbs in Japanese raise to a higher projection but that subjects of unaccusative verbs do not, because nominative Case is licensed directly by the verb. 1

Unaccusatives us. passives

43

Note that Yatsushiro's claim differs from the proposal that Japanese unaccusatives behave in an identical manner to English unaccusatives, with the internal arguments raising to the Spec of TP overtly (Miyagawa 1989; Terada 1990). Yatsushiro moreover argues that unaccusative verbs in Japanese license nominative Case of their arguments overtly in the base position, whereas unaccusative verbs in other languages such as English and Italian may license partitive Case. The difference between Japanese on the one hand and English and Italian on the other is that nominative Case licensing in Japanese unaccusatives is obligatory while partitive Case licensing in English and Italian unaccusatives is optional. In the following, we will first consider the English facts in section 2.1. Then we look at the Japanese facts in section 2.2. In particular, scope facts in the unaccusative and passive constructions will be reviewed. Lastly, the Case licensing mechanism proposed by Yatsushiro (1999) will be discussed.

2.1. English facts Let us first consider the following paradigm with unaccusative and passive verbs in English (examples are from Yatsushiro 1999). (1)

a. Gorillas exist. b. *Exist gorillas. c. There exist gorillas.

(unaccusative)

(2)

a. A man was arrested. (passive) b. *Was arrested a man. c. * There was arrested a man.

Although gorillas in (la) and a man in (2a) surface as the subject in each sentence, they originate in the direct object position. Briefly, the Unaccusative Hypothesis states that there are two types of intransitive verbs, unaccusatives and unergatives. The sole argument of an unaccusative verb is projected internally to the VP,

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like the object of a transitive verb or the subject of a passive verb; in contrast, the subject of an unergative verb is projected externally to the VP, like the subject of a transitive verb. One of the motivations for assuming unaccusative verbs to have only an internal argument comes from the thematic information that the argument bears. That is, the subjects of unaccusative and passive verbs typically bear a Theme role, which is usually assigned to the direct object in the transitive construction. Thus, they contrast with the subjects of transitive and unergative verbs such as sentences in (3), which typically bear an Agent role. (3)

a. John broke the window, b. John ran.

(transitive) (unergative)

Examples in (lb) and (2b) further show that the internal argument base-generated in the object position must raise to the Spec of TP. (lb) and (2b) are ungrammatical because the EPP is not satisfied. Briefly, the EPP requires the Spec of TP be filled with an element overtly. As can been seen from examples in (lc) and (2c), we also observe some difference between unaccusative and passive verbs. That is, the internal argument of unaccusatives, but not that of passives, can remain postverbally if the subject position is filled with an expletive there. Following Belleti (1988) and Lasnik (1992), Yatsushiro argues that the driving force for movement in the unaccusative construction such as (la) is the EPP and that Case of the unaccusative subject (i.e., partitive Case) is licensed by the verb in the base position overtly. In contrast, in the passive construction such as (2a), the driving force for the movement of the internal argument is Case (and the EPP), since the verb does not license Case.

2.2. Japanese facts As briefly mentioned above, Yatsushiro (1999) argues that in Japanese the internal argument of the unaccusative construction

Unaccusatives vs. passives

45

does not raise out of VP, while the derived subject of the passive construction does. She bases her arguments on scope relations between subjects and locative phrases in the unaccusative construction on the one hand, and subjects and locative phrases in the passive construction on the other. Before going into the discussion of scope relations in unaccusatives and passives, let us review scope relations in ordinary transitive sentences. It has been claimed that c-command determines the scope relation between two elements (e.g., Reinhart 1976). In Japanese, the scope relation between the subject and the object is observed to be unambiguous, i.e., the subject takes wide scope over the object (e.g., Hoji 1985; Kuno 1973). Consider the sentence in (4).2 (4)

Dareka-ga daremo-o someone-NOM everyone-ACC 'Someone loves everyone.' (i) someone>everyone (ii) *everyone>someone

aisiteiru. loves

In (4), we obtain only the reading in (i), i.e., there is someone such that that person loves everyone. The reading in (ii), i.e., for each person, there is someone who loves him/her, is not available. But when the object precedes the subject as shown in (5), the readings in (i) and (ii) are both available, and the sentence is ambiguous. (5)

Daremo-o dareka-ga everyone-ACC someone-NOM 'Someone loves everyone.' (i) someone> everyone (ii) everyone>someone

aisiteru. loves

Given the standard assumption that the subject-object order is the base-generated order in Japanese, the contrast between (4) and (5) suggests that when the surface order is different from the base-generated one, we obtain one reading which is not available when the surface order is the same as the base-generated one. The

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relevant configurations are given in (6) and (7) (Yatsushiro 1999: 21): (6)

QPA ... QPB ... Verb

(7)

QP B ,... QPA

... t;...Verb

Following Hornstein (1995), Yatsushiro assumes that when a movement operation takes place, we observe reconstruction effects. That is, we can either reconstruct or not reconstruct the moved element back to the base-generated position. In the case of (6) where no movement has applied, only QPA c-commands QPB, hence QPA takes wide scope over QPB- In the case of (7) where QPB has raised, QPB c-commands QPA, or if QPB is reconstructed to the base position, then QPA c-commands QPB, thus the scope ambiguity arises. To summarize, Yatsushiro assumes that scope can be used to determine structural relationships. When there is no ambiguous scope relation, the order of the two arguments represents the base-generated order of these arguments (in other words, the order gives us their relative hierarchical positions). In contrast, when scope is ambiguous, movement is involved, altering the base-generated order of the two arguments. Based on these assumptions, Yatsushiro further examines the scope relation between the direct object and the locative phrase in sentences like (8). She argues that the locative-object order in (8a) is the base-generated one as there is no ambiguous scope relation (Yatsushiro 1999: 18-19). In (8b) where there is an ambiguous scope relation, the object has raised over the locative phrase. (8)

a. Susi-ga dokoka-ni dono-tegami-mo Susi-NOM somewhere-LOC every-letter-also 'Susi sent every letter to somewhere.' (i) somewhere > every letter (ii) * every letter > somewhere

okutta. sent

Unaccusatives vs. passives

b. Susi-ga dono-tegami-mo dokoka-ni Susi-NOM every-letter-also somewhere-LOC 'Susi sent every letter to somewhere.' (i) somewhere > every letter (ii) every letter > somewhere

47

okutta. sent

Assuming that the Subject-Locative-Object order as in (8a) is the base-generated order in Japanese and that the subjects of unaccusatives and passives are base-generated in the object position, Yatsushiro claims that if the unaccusative and passive subjects move out of the VP (to the Spec of TP), they must raise over the locatives, leading to ambiguous scope relations between nominative and locative phrases. On the other hand, if nominative phrases remain in the base position, the locative-nominative order should result in the unambiguous scope relation. When we consider the unaccusative and passive constructions in (9) and (10), they differ in the scopal properties. That is, the unaccusative sentence with the locative-nominative order is unambiguous (only the reading (i) is available), whereas the passive sentence with the same order is ambiguous (both the readings in (i) and (ii) are available). (9)

Dokoka-ni daremo-ga tuita. somewhere-LOC everyone-NOM arrived 'Everyone arrived somewhere.' (i) somewhere > everyone (ii) * everyone > somewhere

(10) Dokoka-ni dono-hon-mo-(ga) somewhere-LOC every-book-also-(NOM) ok-are-ta. put-PASS-PAST 'Every book was placed somewhere.' (i) somewhere > every book (ii) every book > somewhere

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Makiko Hirakawa

Hence, Yatsushiro argues that the passive construction in (10) is a derived structure, involving double NP movement of the nominative and the locative phrases. She further examines scope relations with the nominative-locative order in unaccusatives and passives. As they involve movement, both are ambiguous. (11) summarizes the scope relation in unaccusatives and passives (Yatsushiro 1999: 41, (41) ).

(11) (a) (b)

Locative-Nominative Nominative-Locative

Unaccusative

Passive

unambiguous ambiguous

ambiguous ambiguous

Note that passive sentences are always ambiguous. Yatsushiro thus argues that nominative phrases of the passive construction raise obligatorily. Based on the contrast between unaccusatives and passives, she concludes that subjects of unaccusatives do not raise over the locative phrase, whereas those of passives raise obligatorily.3

2.3. Case licensing

Yatsushiro suggests that verbs in general, except passive verbs, always license Case to their internal arguments in a local domain, which is defined as follows (Yatsushiro 1999: 43, (42)): (12)

X is within a local domain of Y when it is in the Spec or complement positions of Y.

Following Belletti (1988) and Lasnik (1992), who claim that unaccusative verbs license Case of their arguments, namely partitive Case, Yatsushiro proposes that nominative Case is assigned by unaccusative verbs in Japanese. Belletti (1988) argues that unaccusative verbs can license partitive Case of their complements. She claims that partitive Case is an

Unaccusatives vs. passives

49

inherent Case, so it is assigned along with theta-role assignment by the verb. Furthermore, partitive Case is claimed to be responsible for the definiteness effect. In the English there-construction with unaccusatives and be in (13) and (14), only an indefinite DP can be the subject (Yatsushiro 1999: 65, (71)~ (72)). (13) a. There arrived a man in Storrs. b. *There arrived Uli in Storrs. (14) a. There is a man in Storrs. b. *There arrived Uli in Storrs. Japanese, however, does not show the definiteness effect, as shown by the sentences in (15) (Yatsushiro 1999: 65, (70)). (15) a. Storrs-ni otoko-ga tuita. Storrs-LOC man-NOM arrived Ά man arrived in Storrs.' b. Storrs-ni Uli-ga tuita. Storrs-LOC Uli-NOM arrived 'Uli arrived in Storrs.' Yatsushiro concludes from these examples that partitive Case is not assigned to the argument of the unaccusative verb in Japanese. Instead, she proposes that Japanese unaccusative verbs license nominative Case in the same way as English and Italian unaccusative verbs license partitive Case. This explains why the unaccusative subject remains within the VP in Japanese. In the passive construction, on the other hand, movement of the argument is obligatory because the verb does not license nominative Case. Yatsushiro further claims that the Case licensing of the argument in the unaccusative construction in Japanese is obligatory, whereas it is optional in English, as shown by the sentences such as the following (Yatsushiro 1999: 66, (72)).

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Makiko Hirakawa

(16) a. There arrived a man in Storrs. b. A man arrived in Storrs. The example in (16b) shows that a man raises even though the unaccusative verb should be able to license the Case of a man. It is thus suggested that Case licensing of inherent Case is optional, hence partitive Case does not have to be licensed in the base-generated position, and the argument can raise out of the VP. Lastly, it is possible to have an unaccusative subject in the there-construction as shown in (16a), but impossible to have a passive subject as shown in (17a). (17) a. * There was hit a man. b. A man was hit. Yatsushiro argues that the unavailability of the i/iere-construction with passive verbs is the result of the inability of passive verbs to license the Case of their arguments. The passive verb in English does not assign partitive Case, hence the single argument of the passive construction has to raise overtly to get its Case licensed. In summary, Yatsushiro (1999) has shown that Japanese unaccusative verbs license nominative Case of their argument. The Case licensing ability of the unaccusative verbs is motivated by the proposals of Belletti (1988) and Lasnik (1992), but Yatsushiro's proposal differs from theirs in that Japanese unaccusatives license nominative Case not partitive Case. Table 1 summarizes properties associated with Case licensing of the unaccusative and passive verbs in English and Japanese. Table 7. Case licensing and NP raising in the unaccusative and passive constructions Unaccusatives (including be) Passives

English Partitive Case (optional) definiteness effect

Japanese Nominative Case (obligatory) no definiteness effect

no Case licensing NP must raise

no Case licensing NP must raise

Unaccusatives vs. passives

51

3. Previous studies It has been reported that unaccusative verbs, but not unergative verbs, cause problems to L2 learners. Many previous studies have focused on L2 English (Balcom 1995, 1997; Hirakawa 1995; Oshita 1997; Shomura 1996; Yip 1995; Zobl 1989) but other languages such as Italian, French, Chinese and Japanese have also been investigated (Hirakawa 1999, 2000, 2001; Sorace 1993a, 1993b, 1995; Sorace and Shomura 2001, Yuan 1996, 1999). These studies generally report that even advanced learners have difficulty acquiring unaccusative verbs. For example, studies on L2 English have reported typical L2 errors with unaccusative verbs, i.e., overgeneralization of passive morphemes to unaccusatives (e.g., the moon was disappeared suddenly). As these errors were confined to unaccusative verbs, it has been claimed that such errors in fact suggest that L2 learners distinguish between unaccusatives and unergatives, base-generating the unaccusative argument in the object position. Learners however incorrectly apply passive morphology to the unaccusative construction, attempting to indicate that the single argument moves from the object to subject position. Using syntactic structures which distinguish between the unaccusatives and unergatives as tests to examine L2 learners' knowledge, it has been argued that Japanese speakers of English (Hirakawa 1995, 2000) and English speakers of Japanese (Hirakawa 2000, 2001) observe the unaccusative/unergative distinction at the level which is not apparent from surface structures in the L2 input. In this section, Yuan (1996) will be reviewed in more detail. He has investigated the L2 acquisition of Chinese unaccusative verbs by English-speaking learners. To my knowledge, Yuan (1996) (also Yuan 1999) is the only study which dealt with the definiteness of NPs in the unaccusative construction in L2 acquisition. Hence, it is especially relevant to the present study. Chinese observes the unaccusative/unergative distinction (Li 1990, cited in Yuan 1996). It is an SVO language, and the single argument of an unaccusative verb can appear in a preverbal posi-

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Makiko Hirakawa

tion (18a) or remain in the base-generated object position (18b). When the NP remains in the object position, the NP must be indefinite, as shown in (18c) (Yuan 1996: 203).4 The definite NP must appear in the preverbal position (18d).5 (18) a. shang ge yue san sou chuan zai zhe last CL month three CL ship in this ge hai yu chen le. CL sea area sink PFV 'Last month, three ships sank in this area.' b. shang ge yue, zai zhe ge hai yu chen last CL month in this CL sea area sink le san sou chuan. PFV three CL ship 'Last month, three ships sank in this area.' c. *shang ge yue, zai zhe ge hai yu chen last CL month in this CL sea area sink le na sou chuan. PFV that CL ship 'Last month, that ship sank in this area.' d. shang ge yue, na sou chuan zai zhe ge last CL month that CL ship in this CL hai yu chen le. sea area sink PFV 'Last month, that ship sank in this area.' An experiment was conducted to test whether English-speaking learners would allow the single argument of an unaccusative verb, but not that of an unergative verb, to be in the object position in Chinese, and whether they would acquire the knowledge of inherent partitive Case on the postverbal NPs of the unaccusative verbs. 48 English-speaking learners of Chinese, representing three proficiency levels, participated in the experiment. 6 These subjects were students and research fellows studying or teaching at a university in England. There was also a control group of 14 native

Unaccusatives vs. passives

53

speakers of Chinese. A scale-judgment task was conducted in which subjects were asked to judge the acceptability of test sentences. The test sentences included unaccusative and unergative verbs, and they differed with respect to the position of the NP and its definiteness. Overall results showed that all the experimental groups generally accepted preverbal NP sentences, but they behaved differently on the postverbal NP sentences. The least advanced group rejected them consistently regardless of the verb type. Yuan claimed that this is due to LI transfer, the single argument of unaccusatives moving to the subject position for nominative Case assignment as in English. The acceptability of postverbal sentences increased as their proficiency improved. The intermediate group accepted the postverbal NP structure but they appeared not to have made the unaccusative/unergative distinction, allowing the postverbal NP with unaccusatives and unergatives. They also failed to observe the definiteness effect on the postverbal argument of unaccusative verbs. Yuan attributed these learners' behavior to the "missetting of the word order" in their L2 Chinese (1996: 212). That is, even though the basic word order in Chinese is Subject-VP, learners at this stage mistakenly assume that Chinese allows postverbal subject inversion via the VP-adjunction mechanism proposed for languages like Italian (Burzio 1986). 7 Thus, Yuan claims that the underlying structure of a postverbal unaccusative sentence is (19) (Yuan 1996: 213): (19) [VP [VP [ν V u ]] NP;] The VP-adjoined position in (19) can accommodate the definite argument of the unaccusative verb. The most advanced learners appeared to have made the unaccusative/unergative distinction as well as have known the definiteness effect, even though their mean scores on the postverbal NP sentence types were quite different from the native controls. When the individual scores of the most advanced group (n=22) were further analyzed in terms of consistency in their responses, it was found that 27% of the learners (n=6) consistently made responses ο

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Makiko Hirakawa

like native speakers, accepting the postverbal NP structure only with unaccusatives and indefinite NPs. Yuan argues that these learners have attained the target grammar, observing unaccusativity with the correct representation in (20) as well as partitive Case assignment of unaccusative verbs.9 (20) [vp [ν· V NP;]] In sum, although it was possible for the 6 learners in the most advanced group to acquire the correct representations for unaccusative and unergative verbs in Chinese, many learners had difficulty acquiring the properties associated with Chinese unaccusative verbs, namely postverbal indefinite NPs.

4. Experiment An experimental study was conducted to investigate Japanese speakers' knowledge of the Case licensing mechanism of unaccusatives and passives in L2 English. At issue is whether or not L2 learners know the following properties: (i) unaccusative verbs license partitive Case while passive verbs license no Case, (ii) the arguments of unaccusatives observe the definiteness effect when they bear partitive Case, and (iii) the D-feature of Τ is strong so that the EPP effect is observed. If they know that partitive Case is licensed by unaccusative verbs and be and that the EPP effect is observed in English, then they should accept sentences of the form of (21a) and (21b) and reject (21c) and (21d). (21) a. b. c. d.

NP - unaccusative/Z?e there - unaccusative/be - an indefinite NP *there - unaccusative/be - a definite NP *e - unaccusative//*? - NP

Unaccusatives us. passives

55

If they are aware that passives are unable to license Case and that the EPP effect is observed, then they should accept (22a) and reject (22b) and (22c). (22) a. NP-passive b. * there - passive - NP c. *e - passive - NP In addition, it is hypothesized that where LI and L2 manifest the same properties, these properties will be acquired easily, whereas those properties which differ between two languages will be harder to acquire, at least earlier stages of L2 acquisition. Thus, properties associated with passives should be acquired earlier than those associated with unaccusatives. It should be noted that, even though passives in both languages manifest the same properties with respect to Case licensing and argument raising and even though the argument and the verb look the same on the surface (i.e., NP-V), it is not the case that both languages have exactly the same representation at the abstract level where the argument is projected. That is, English is an SVO language while Japanese is an SOV language. Therefore, the single arguments of English passives and unaccusatives are base-generated postverbally, whereas those of Japanese passives and unaccusatives are base-generated preverbally. In the case of English passives, passive arguments raise over the verb; on the other hand, the movement of arguments of Japanese passives do not raise over the verb since the verb is head-final; hence, movement from object to subject position is not obvious from the surface.

4.1. Subjects 23 Japanese learners of English participated in the experiment. They were second- and third-year students at a university located in Saitama, Japan, at the intermediate-level. Based on their answers to a questionnaire, subjects were considered to have similar back-

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Makiko Hirakawa

grounds with respect to the age of the initial exposure (around 12). Many of the subjects indicated that they had traveled in some English-speaking countries, but none of the subjects had never lived abroad for an extended period of time (1 week to 2 months being what they reported). There was also a control group of 11 native speakers of English, who were students at a university in Canada.

4.2. Task Subjects responded to a grammaticality judgment task in which they were presented with pairs of sentences. They were asked to judge the appropriateness of the second sentence in each case by circling one of the numbers on a scale, from -2, completely unacceptable, to +2, completely acceptable. They were told to avoid using 0 and use it only when they were unable to make a decision. An example is given in (23). (23) The weather has been very bad in the South. Another storm arose in Florida today. The task included 48 test items in total. There were four verb categories: unaccusatives, passives, be and others. These verb categories were tested with different sentence structures, which varied in terms of the position of the single argument of the verb (i.e., preverbal vs. postverbal) and the definiteness of the argument (i.e., definite vs. indefinite). A list of sentence types is given below:10 (24) Sentence types a. Unaccusatives (exist, arise, develop, remain, and appear) Type 1: NP-V (e.g., Three men remained on the airplane.) Type 2: *e-V-NP (e.g., Remained three men on the airplane.)

Unaccusatives vs. passives

Type 3: (e.g., Type 4: (e.g.,

57

there-V-indef. NP There remained three men on the airplane.) *there-V-def. NP There remained the three men on the airplane.)

There were 5 unaccusative verbs, each appeared in four different structures. Type 1 was the grammatical NP-V structure. This was to check whether subjects would know that the unaccusative argument can raise to the Spec of TP. Type 2 was the ungrammatical structure, with an empty subject position and the single argument remaining postverbally in the base position. Types 3 and 4 differed only in terms of definiteness of the postverbal NP in order to examine learners' knowledge of definiteness effect. Type 3 was the grammatical there-construction with an indefinite NP; Type 4 was the ungrammatical ί/iere-construction with a definite NP. b. Passives {speak, read, arrest, wash, and build) Type 5: NP- be+Ved (e.g., His novels are read around the world.) Type 6: *e-fo>+Ved-NP (e.g., Are read his novels around the world.) Type 7: *there- be+Ved -NP (e.g., There are read his novels around the world.) Passives were formed with 5 transitive verbs, and each verb appeared in 3 different structures.11 Type 5 was the well-formed passive structure. Type 6 was ill-formed, NP remaining postverbally with the empty subject. Type 7 was the ungrammatical there-construction, which was to see whether subjects would know that passive arguments cannot remain in the base position even when the subject position is filled with there. c. Be Type 8: NP-be (e.g., Several people were already in the garden.)

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Makiko Hirakawa Type 9: *e-6e-NP (e.g., Were already several people in the garden.) Type 10: there-be-indef. NP (e.g., There were already several people in the garden.) Type 11: *there-be-dcf. NP (e.g., There were already the people in the garden.)

An auxiliary verb be denoting existence of some NPs is also analyzed as unaccusative by Belleti (1988), Lasnik (1992) and Yatsushiro (1999). Be verbs were grouped separately from unaccusatives in this study, in order to examine whether or not learners and native speakers would treat the two alike. Be was tested with four sentence types, as in the case of unaccusative verbs, but each represented by only two tokens. Type 8 was the grammatical NP-V structure. Type 9 was the ungrammatical structure in which the NP appeared postverbally with an empty subject position. Type 10 was the grammatical there-construction with an indefinite NP, whereas Type 11 was the ungrammatical ί/iere-construction with a definite NP. d. distracters (smile, laugh, walk, play, and come ) Type 12: NP-V Lastly, Type 12 was included as distracters, each verb appearing only once in the test. Both definite and indefinite NPs appeared in the subject position.

4.3. Results 4.3.1. Results by verb type Results are reported in terms of mean scores on each sentence type by group. See Table 2. Recall that it was a scale-judgement task (-2 to +2) so that +2 represents the maximum score accepting the sen-

Unaccusatives vs. passives

59

tence, whereas -2 represents the maximum score rejecting the sentence. No subjects showed a response bias (i.e., either accepting or rejecting all test sentences) so that all the subjects were retained for the analysis. English native speakers generally responded as expected, although their acceptance of grammatical sentences and rejection of ungrammatical sentences varied to some degree among sentence types. Learners generally accepted grammatical sentence types but they were less accurate in detecting the ungrammaticality of ill-formed sentences. Regarding Types 1-4 with unaccusatives, native speakers accepted Type 1 (NP-V) and rejected Type 2 (*e-V-NP). Their acceptance of Type 3 (ί/iere-V-indef. NP) and their rejection of Type 4 (*there-V-def. NP) were not very strong in that their means fell around ±0.7, but the difference was significant so that native speakers indeed observed the definiteness effect. Regarding L2 learners, they accepted the grammatical Type 1, but their means on Types 2-4 were all very close to zero. Table 2. Mean scores of each sentence type by group Unaccusative Type 1: NP-V Type 2: *e-V-NP Type 3: There-V-indef. NP Type 4; There-V-Act NP Passive Type 5: NP- be+Vtd Type 6: *e- be+Vtd -NP Type 7: * There- be+Vtd -NP Be Type 8: NP-be Type 9: *e-fce-NP Type 10: There-be-mdti. NP Type 11: * There-be-def. NP Other Type 12: NP-V

Learners («=23)

Native Speakers («=11)

1.27 -0.20 0.03 0.10

(0.52) (1.13) (0.95) (0.92)

1.66 (0.41) -1.62 (0.78) 0.69 (0.58) -0.66 (0.43)

1.33 (0.78) -0.74 (0.73) -0.04(0.90)

1.80 (0.28) -1.78 (0.28) -1.35(0.61)

0.98 -0.52 1.37 0.46

(1.16) (1.28) (0.79) (1.27)

2.00 (0) -1.36 (0.84) 2.00 (0) -0.68 (1.44)

1.14 (0.67)

1.80 (0.42)

60

Makiko Hirakawa

According to a repeated measures ANOVA, there was no significant effect for group (F(l, 32)=1.542, p=0.22) but there was a significant effect for sentence type (^(3, 96)=66.401, pcO.OOOl). An interaction between group and sentence type was also found significant (F(3, 96)=18.131,/?