Case and the ECP revisited: reply to Kellerman and Yoshioka (1999)

2000 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 267-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kazue Kanno

Kellerman and Yoshioka (1999) report the results of three studies on case drop in Japanese involving Dutch-speaking L2 learners. They claim that contra Kanno (1996 and 1998), there was no evidence that their subjects have access to the Empty Category Principle (ECP), which is claimed to regulate the omission of case particles in Japanese. In its place, they propose an alternative functional account: the one-noun hypothesis. Kellerman and Yoshioka point to the availability of Japanese in Hawaii (where Kanno's studies took place) as the source for the ‘inter-population intra-principle’ inconsistency between their study and hers. This paper re-examines their results and argues that they do not undermine the ECP hypothesis. In support of Kanno (1996 and 1998), this paper also presents the results of a new experiment and a reanalysis of Hirakawa's (1998) study.

1999 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Kellerman ◽  
Kaoru Yoshioka

An article in the last Second Language Research (Kanno, 1998) describes studies in which American adult learners of Japanese in Hawai’i are tested for their knowledge of two UG principles: the Empty Category Principle and the Overt Pronoun Constraint.Kanno shows that native-like knowledge on the part of a learner of the workings of the one principle will not necessarily guarantee that the same individual will have knowledge of the other principle at the same point in time. Therefore, learners are not ‘laterally consistent’. Furthermore, where learners do demonstrate knowledge of a principle at Time 1, they may not do so at Time 2. Thus, says Kanno, there is also a problem of ‘longitudinal consistency’.However, in our comment on Kanno’s paper, we suggest that another form of ‘lateral inconsistency’, which arises from a failure to replicate Kanno’s findings for the ECP in another population of adult learners, constitutes a further muddying of the waters in the UG accessibility debate.


1999 ◽  
Vol 62 ◽  
pp. 87-97
Author(s):  
Anne-Mieke Janssen-van Dieten

There is an increasing awareness that the number of non-native speakers in the category of 'adult, highly educated, advanced L2-learners' is rapidly increasing. This paper presents an analysis of what it means to teach them a second language - whether it is Dutch or any other second language. It is argued that, on the one hand, conceptions about language learning and teaching are insufficiendy known, and that, on the other hand, there are many widespread misconceptions that prevent language teachers from catering adequately for people's actual communicative needs, and from providing tailor-made solutions to these problems.


Author(s):  
Lisa Travis ◽  
Greg Lamontagne

In this paper, we will investigate certain phenomena which appear sensitive to particular conditions of adjacency and provide an explanation of these conditions in terms of syntactic structure and principles defined over such structure. Two interesting results which follow from such an explanation are: (i) the Case Filter given in (1) below, which stipulates that phonetically realized NPs must receive Case, may be subsumed under the Empty Category Principle, and (ii) the claim that only Case-marked traces are visible at PF (which has been suggested as an explanation of wanna contraction facts) can be given a structural account.


1986 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-180
Author(s):  
Dudley K. Nylander

Author(s):  
Bent Jacobsen

The present paper takes its point of departure in the concept of empty NP-categories, as this is embodied in a more comprehensive theory of NPs. The theoretical framework adopted is mainly that expouned in Chomsky: Lextures on Government and Binding (1981) and subsequent works (though no attempt has been made to incorporate the revised model presented in Chomsky: Barriers (1986)). The paper gives a brief introduction to the main modules of a modern generative grammar (X-bar syntax;0-theory; government (including proper government and the Extended Empty Category Principle); the theory of abstract Case; the theory of Binding; and the theory of Bouding). The paper falls into two parts. In the first part the basic modules and principles are introduced. In the second part, to be published in the next issue of Hermes, it will be shown how these modules interact in the derivation of sentences. Particular attention will be paid to NP-Movement and Wh-Movement. A separate section will deal with the status of PRO. The full bibliography appears after both parts.


2007 ◽  
Vol 38 (3) ◽  
pp. 485-523 ◽  
Author(s):  
Idan Landau

The fact that the specifier of T0 is subject both to the Extended Projection Principle (EPP) and to the Empty Category Principle (ECP) has remained an unexplained accident within Government-Binding Theory. I propose a principled account of this correlation. The EPP is a selectional requirement of functional heads (e.g., T, Top, C) that applies at PF—an instance of p-selection for an overt element. Like all selectional requirements, it applies to the head of the selected phrase, explaining why null heads cannot appear in EPP positions (thus deriving certain representational ECP effects). A wide range of empirical results follow, all unified by the exclusion of null-headed phrases from EPP positions: subject-object asymmetries in the distribution of bare nouns in Romance and sentential complements; failure of certain adjuncts to occur in clause-initial position; resistance of indirect objects to Ā-movement; and phonological doubling of heads of fronted categories. I argue against the agreement/checking view of the EPP and show that only the selectional construal allows a natural explanation of its puzzling properties.


2004 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 193-211 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vlad Žegarac

This article considers the implications of Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/95) Relevance Theory for the acquisition of English the by second language (L2) learners whose first language (L1) does not have an article system. On the one hand, Relevance Theory provides an explicit characterization of the semantics of the, which suggests ways of devising more accurate guidelines for teaching/learning than are available in current textbooks. On the other hand, Relevance Theoretic assumptions about human communication together with some effects of transfer from L1 provide the basis for a number of predictions about the types of L2 learners’ errors in the use of the.I argue that data from previous research (Trenkić, 2002) lend support to these predictions, and I try to show that examples drawn from the data I have collected provide evidence for the view that L2 learning is not influenced only by general pragmatic principles and hypotheses about L2 based on transfer from L1, but that learners also devise and test tacit hypotheses which are idiosyncratic to them.


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