Contractions operate within syntactic movement constraints.
the verdict
CONTESTED
contested - the weight sits with the supporting side
refutedsupported
the weight of evidence
3 sources for · 0 against
The listed linguistic literature discusses syntactic movement constraints and mentions phenomena like wanna-contraction and wh-movement, but does not collectively confirm that all contractions operate within these constraints.
Recent proposals have suggested that second language learners, unlike native speakers, are ‘shallow processors’ in that they do not make use of abstract syntactic knowledge in parsing, relying instead on lexical semantic knowledge and pragmatic notions such as plausibility (Clahsen & Felser, 2006a,b). The present study tested whether Najdi Arabic learners of English process whdependencies incrementally and whether they use knowledge of syntactic constraints in the processing of wh-movement. A group of advanced L2 learners (n = 40) as well as a control group of English native speakers (n = 40) participated in a self-paced reading study, which was based on Stowe (1986). The results of two experiments suggest that non-native processing is, like native processing, incremental and guided by syntactic constraints.
This paper presents results from two experiments on the L2 acquisition of wh-features and relevant constraints (Superiority and Subjacency) by L1 Sinhala–L2 English speakers. Our results from a Truth Value Judgment Task and a Grammaticality Judgment Task with 31 English native controls and 38 Sinhala/English bilinguals show that the advanced adult L2 speakers of English we tested have successfully acquired the uninterpretable wh-Q feature and relevant movement constraints in English, despite the lack of overt wh-movement in L1-Sinhala. These results raise questions for Representational Deficit Accounts of second language acquisition and offer evidence that (i) uninterpretable syntactic features are not necessarily subject to an early critical period and (ii) uninterpretable features not instantiated in learners’ L1 can be available for L2 syntactic computation. We take our results as evidence for full access by L2 learners to syntactic properties that are not instantiated in their L1, but that remain accessible due to a cognitive capacity for language (i.e., knowledge of Universal Grammar) independently of the L1.
... of wanna contraction in subject extraction questions because the contraction is excluded by the constraint , we would first want to establish that these children use wanna contraction in the object extraction questions , the syntactic ...
This introductory guide to language acquisition research is presented within the framework of Universal Grammar, a theory of the human faculty for language. The authors focus on two experimental techniques for assessing children's linguistic competence: the Elicited Production task, a production task, and the Truth Value Judgment task, a comprehension task. Their methodologies are designed to overcome the numerous obstacles to empirical investigation of children's language competence. They produce research results that are more reproducible and less likely to be dismissed as an artifact of improper experimental procedure. In the first section of the book, the authors examine the fundamental assumptions that guide research in this area; they present both a theory of linguistic competence an
Everything we examined (3)
This check searched the claim as stated. It did not run a separate search for evidence against it.