FIRST LANGUAGE EFFECT OF THE
FIRST LANGUAGE ON
SPANISH LEARNERS’ PRODUCTION
OF ENGLISH EMBEDDED INTERROGATIVE CLAUSES
clac 10/2002
Marciano
Escutia
Centro
de Estudios Superiores Felipe II, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
ABSTRACT. This paper tries to articulate from the
point of view of linguistic theory how Spanish native grammatical competence of
embedded indirect questions, as characterized by the Minimalist Program
(Chomsky, 1995), can influence knowledge and production of such structures in
non-native English by adult Spanish learners. A theory on the difference
between native and adult non-native acquisition is also invoked in order to
support the need for explicitly teaching and making adult learners aware of the
differences between the two languages for these particular structures.
KEY WORDS: grammatical competence, embedded indirect
questions, minimalist program, native
and non-native language acquisition.
RESUMEN. Este trabajo
intenta articular desde el punto de vista de la teoría lingüística cómo la
competencia gramatical nativa respecto a las oraciones interrogativas
indirectas del español peninsular –tal como las caracteriza el Programa
Minimalista (Chomsky 1995)- puede influir en el análisis y en la producción de dichas estructuras en
el inglés no nativo de los estudiantes castellanohablantes adultos. Se acude
también a una teoría sobre las diferencias entre la adquisición de una lengua
nativa y el aprendizaje adulto de una no
nativa para apoyar la necesidad de la enseñanza explícita de las citadas
construcciones y de hacer conscientes a dichos estudiantes de las diferencias
estructurales entre ambas lenguas.
PALABRAS CLAVES:
competencia gramatical, oraciones interrogativas indirectas, programa
minimalista, adquisición nativa y no nativa del lenguaje.
1. The problem
Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in
Spain have first-hand experience with their (peninsular) Spanish speaking
students of their clear tendency to produce and accept[1] indirect embedded questions that are ungrammatical in
Modern Standard English (MSE) because of the subject-auxiliary (S-Aux)
inversion they show, which in this variety is only grammatical in direct (root)
questions. We have in mind examples like the following two, taken from
learners’ actual written utterances, both produced by two adult
high-intermediate EFL students and transcribed below along with their
grammatical native versions and corresponding Spanish glosses:
(1)
*She asked why hadn’t he arrived yet
‘She asked why he hadn’t arrived yet’
(Ella)
Preguntó por qué (?él) no había (??él) llegado (él) aún
(2)
*She wanted to know where did Helen live
‘She wanted to know where
Helen lived’
(Ella) Quería
saber dónde (??Helen) vivía
(Helen)
These two examples present S-Aux inversion and the
second one even provides do support,
that is, it seems as if these students are treating them like direct questions,
or, putting it in different terms, they are overgeneralizing the structure of
English direct (root) questions to indirect (embedded) ones. We will try to
characterize the grammatical structure of these non-native sentences from a
contrastive analysis perspective using as a reference frame the Minimalist
Program (Chomsky 1995), as presented by Radford (1997). Linguistic,
acquisitional and -secondarily- pedagogical consequences will also be drawn.
2. Direct and indirect questions in English and
Spanish
The Minimalist Program assumes that S-Aux inversion in
MSE direct questions is a consequence of head movement whereby the head
Inflection[2] (I), the syntactic functional category comprising
finite auxiliaries and infinitival to
from which clauses –formulated here as Inflectional Phrases (IPs)- project,
raises by ‘attraction’ to the (next higher head) Complementizer (C) position,
the head which projects those embedded clauses –Complementizer Phrases (CPs)-
introduced by complementizers (such as that,
if and for). In such structures C is a “strong” head containing a strong
abstract affix (Q), which means that it must be adjoined to a head. This head
is the Aux element under I, the next
lower head which rises to join it, as head movement has to keep to the principle
of strict cyclicity, which favors the
shortest head-to-head movement, be it a modal, perfective or progressive
auxiliary or do support (use of the
dummy auxiliary do). This is
represented (in a simplified way[3]) in the structural tree in (3), along with a possible
Wh-question with the Wh-word in its Specifier -position preceding the phrase
head- “landing” site, with the traces (t) left by movement from the original
places:
CP
(Whatj) C’
C IP
Will/Can/Have/Doi Q D I’
you I VP
ti V D
answer me/(tj)
(Quej) trajo Pedro t’i ti algo/(tj)
‘(What) brought Pedro something’
In Peninsular Spanish -as well as in French or Early
Modern English- lexical verbs invert with the subject both in yes/no and
Wh-root questions, as can be seen in examples (4), (5) and (6) below. This is
possible, following the Minimalist program, because they have strong agreement
features -manifested in a rich system of agreement inflections- which allow them
first to raise from V to I[4] and then to C in order to adjoin to the strong affix
contained in this head, as represented also in (3) for the sentence Trajo/Ha traído Pedro algo? (‘Did/Has Pedro bring/brought anything?’).
(4) ¿Viene Juan
por la tarde?
Comes Juan in the afternoon
‘Does
Juan come the afternoons?’
(5) ¿Qué
trajo Pedro ayer?
What brought Pedro yesterday
‘What did Pedro bring yesterday?’
(6)
¿Qué dijiste que trajo Pedro ayer?
What
said-you that brought Pedro yesterday
‘What did you say Pedro brought yesterday?’
However, as shown in examples (1) and (2), in MSE
S-Aux inversion is not allowed in embedded (indirect) questions. In this case,
it is assumed either that C is weak, not containing a strong affix needing to
adjoin to a head, or that embedded questions have a covert null complementizer[5] which adjoins to the strong affix within C, thus
satisfying by merger -the basic operation which creates structural trees by
combining pairs of categories to form larger structures- instead of
movement, the latter’s need to be
adjoined to a head.
In
Peninsular Spanish, our L1 in this case, subject-verb inversion is also
preferred in embedded questions, as marked by interrogation marks for the less
preferred positions in the Spanish glosses to examples (1) and (2) or in
example (6)[6]. This clear preference, following Minimalist
assumptions, might point to Spanish embedded CPs also containing a (verbal)
head C with a strong Q affix which must be adjoined to a head[7]. This is realized here by verb (head) movement, as in
Spanish verbs have strong agreement
features.
3. Transfer
and/or overgeneralization
Taking into account the previous discussion, one could
think that our Spanish adult students either transfer the functional “skeleton”
or structure of their native or first language (L1) with that embedded strong
head C into English, their target or second language (L2) in this case, or they
overgeneralize the structure of the L2 root questions to embedded ones or that
either option reinforce the other, which leads them to produce S-Aux inversion[8]. The latter possibility would be consistent with
those L2 acquisition theories (cf. Andersen 1990) which postulate that a
certain item will appear in the non-native L2 if it is consistent both with the
L1 and what they call ‘general acquisition principles’. These are strategies or
learning procedures encompassing L2 learning. In this case the general
acquisition principle would be the null hypothesis of supposing that all questions
(root or embedded) have the same structure.
What
students at this level of proficiency never accept or produce either in root or
embedded questions is Subject-Verb inversion as in their L1. They rather invert
consistently the modal or primary auxiliary (they acquire do-support early) even though this is not coherent with the L1, as
can be seen in the Spanish translations of sentences (1) and (2), where the
least likely position for the subject to appear is that following the
auxiliary. This shows that even if there is transfer, it is not of surface
aspects of the L1 but of the functional characteristics of the L1 -that is, of
the [+STRONG] feature value of the functional category C. At the same time
these learners are functioning within the rules of the L2 and know that lexical
verbs in MSE cannot raise to C.
Thus, L2 learning does not consist simply in the relexification or dressing up of the
structures of the L1 in L2 words, but a different process where the underlying
grammars of both the L1 and L2 seem to be at work and which the framework we
have used allows us to formalize. This is consistent with Liceras’s model of L2
acquisition (1996), according to which when adults learn an L2 they restructure
(parts of) the linguistic representations they already possess on the model of
the L2 surface structure because their learning procedures, unlike those of L1
acquisition, cannot accede the feature values of the functional or lexical
elements being acquired or learned.
4. Pedagogical
consequences
From the linguistic and acquisitional characterization
presented above, one can conclude that, in terms of pedagogical rules, our
Spanish adult students must be taught that S-Aux inversion cannot take place in
embedded indirect questions, as the feature values of the functional categories
may be inaccessible to adult L2 acquisition. This could involve the explicit
teaching of the concept and formulation of both direct and indirect questions
and showing that while in the former the first auxiliary (or a corresponding do form in its absence) is raised to the
front of the sentence or immediately after the Wh-word, in the latter no such
raising takes place.
We
can expect that at the beginning of L2 learning there will be transfer from the
L1, which favors inversion in the case of the structures we have studied here.
Even later, when students know that inversion is not possible in embedded
questions and have a higher proficiency level, they will still tend to produce
it, as did the students who produced sentences (3) and (4) and also do even
more advanced learners when they cannot monitor their performance. In this
sense, some both oral and written drilling practice, both at the time of
presenting them for the first time as in later revisions of these
constructions, might be convenient in order to help create a habit against that
tendency towards inversion. Even if we do not subscribe to the view that
learning a foreign language is a matter of developing habits to counteract L1
interference, there are some aspects of language production which benefit from
this kind of practice once the learner has cognitively understood what is going
on. We think that this may be one of them[9].
Our
linguistic study here adds nothing new in terms of pedagogical consequences for
the teaching of English indirect embedded questions but it did not set out to
do that in the first place. However, it serves to back up the intuition many
EFL teachers have always had, namely, the need for these structures to be
taught explicitly to adult learners, making them aware of the obligatory nature
of non-inversion in indirect embedded questions in MSE.
References
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SCOMP en español”. Sintaxi, Teoría i
Perspectives. Comp. A. Viana . Lleida: Pagès Editors: 59-102.
Chomsky, N. 1995.
The Minimalist Program. Cambridge,
Mass: MIT Press.
Henry, A. 1995. Belfast English and Standard English:
Dialect Variation and Parameter Setting. Oxford University Press.
Kayne, R. S.
1982. “Predicates and arguments, verbs and nouns”. GLOW Newsletter, 8:24.
Liceras, J. 1996. La Adquisición de las Lenguas Segundas y la Gramática Universal. Madrid: Síntesis.
Pollock, J.Y.
1989. "Verb-movement, UG
and the structure of IP". Linguistic
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Syntactic Theory and the Structure of
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Torrego, E. 1984:
“On inversion in Spanish and some of its effects”. Linguistic Inquiry, 15: 103-129.
©
Marciano Escutia. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación 10,
mayo 2002. ISSN 1576-4737.
http://www.ucm.es/info/circulo/no10/escutia.htm