"The Old Man Knows the Exceptions...": Vietnamese & Japanese L2 Learners on the English Left Periphery

In this talk, I’ll present the results from a project carried out in 2019-2021, which is concerned with L2 learners’ sensitivity to exceptions to the general rules of (short) wh-movement and complementation in English (Chomsky 1957, et seq.). In contrast to the attention paid to constraints on long-distance movement – e.g., L1: Guasti, 1994; L2: Martohardjono, (1993), White & Juffs, 1998 – exceptions to ‘short movement’ have hitherto been almost neglected. The specific focus here is on three of four constructions: (1) Wh-interactions with finiteness (She knew [why she should eat more vegetables]. ~ She knew [*why to eat more vegetables]; (2) Wh-interactions with negative adverbials (“?What1 under no circumstances2 should3 you … ~ ??Under no circumstances2 what1 should3 you... ~*Under no circumstances2 should3 what1 you ... ~ ?What1 should3 under no circumstances2 you ... give to a dog.”; cf. Haegeman 2012); (3) Wh-interactions in ‘Sluice-Stranding contexts’ (“She asked to attend to something, but I can’t remember what/*what to/??to what?”; Culicover 1998); (4) Raising vs. Control complements (“Amy is *uncertain/certain to lock up. Amy is uncertain/?certain how to lock up.”; cf. Yoshimura et al., 2016). This phase of the project compared Vietnamese and Japanese L2 learners of English: though both L1s are wh-in situ languages, structural commonalities between Vietnamese and English predict an advantage for Vietnamese learners in conditions that probe knowledge of the “left periphery”.

The results obtained to date—especially the differences observed between the two groups of L2 learners—present some contrasting challenges for theories of acquisition, for inductive and deductive approaches alike: on one hand, learners show surprising sensitivity to comparatively rare, sporadic exceptions to short movement; on the other, many of these effects are limited to highly language-particular lexical contexts. I’ll examine some possible ways of addressing these challenges, from the perspective of the learner and of the language researcher.