Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1995

of universal grammar ( UG) and the mother tongue in the acquisition of a second language.' A c c o r d i ng t o Ame r i c an l i ngu i st N o am Chomsky, UG i s part of the innately endowed faculty of humank i nd responsible for language acquisition. It explains w h y children can acquire their mother tongue i n a matter of a few years. Dr. Y ip continues, 'The question for us is ： Since most Ho ng Kong students do not really acquire English simultaneously w i th their mother tongue in their formative years, is UG still available t o them wh en they learn a second language? We also want to k n ow h ow much they have been i n f l uen c ed b y their mo t her tongue i n their learning process .' Difficultie s Po ed b yReflexiv e Pronoun s Let's return to the first sample question. While in the Cantonese sentence 'Mary y í hw à ih Susan h ó u jang jihg é i.' (瑪莉以爲蘇珊好憎自己), 'jihg é i' or 'self can refer t o either Mary o r Susan, a s any native speaker of the dialect can tell you, i n 'Mary t hought that Susan d i s l i ked herself.', 'herself can only refer t o Susan, wh i ch some native speakers of Cantonese may not be able to tell you. Another relevant contrast involves subject-orientation: the Cantonese 'jihg é i' must refer to the subject of a clause as in'Peterb é i-j ó Paul yat j e u ng j i h g é i g e s é ung '. (彼得俾 咗保羅一張自己嘅相)', whereas the English 'self' may refer to either the subject or the object, as i n 'Peter gave Paul a picture of himself.' These aspects o f reflexive pronouns were tested i n the first part o f the project. The 270 students selected as subjects fall into three levels of English proficiency ： Secondary 2 and 3 (level I), Secondary 4 and 5 (level II, and Secondary 6 ， 7, and first year university (level III). There was also a control group consisting o f native English speakers. Constraint s o nSyntacti c Movemen t in Wh-question s Using the same subject group, the second part of the project investigated knowledge of certain UG principles such as subjacency, w h i c h i s defined as the capability to recognize and rule out ungrammatical movement structure. Unlike English, Cantonese does not instantiate syntactic movement i n questions. For example, i n the English question, 'Who d id y ou see?', 'who' has b e en mo v ed t o the f r on t, whe r eas i n the Cantonese equ i va l ent o f the ques t i on, t h e q u e s t i o n - wo rd s i mp ly replaces the object. (你見到邊個?） Some secondary a nd p r i ma ry English teachers may tell their students ： T o f o rm a grammatical wh-question, all y ou need to do is to move the wh - wo rd to the front.' However, the students and perhaps even the teachers may not realize that while there is movement, there are also constraints wh i ch set the limits between possible and impossible structures. Dr. Tang says, 'The properties we're investigating have t o do w i t h the constraints on such movements, that is, we want to k n ow whether learners realize certain ungrammatical aspects wh i ch show up w h en there's an impossible structure.' The students were presented w i t h pairs o f questions like these: ' J ohn heard the news that Mary hated who?', w i t h ' wh o ' underlined as the entity being questioned, f o l l owed by 'Who d id John hear the news that Mary hated?' They were then asked t o judge the grammaticality o f the second sentence. Som e Preliminar y Finding s The results o f the expe r iment o n reflexive pronouns show transfer f r om Cantonese at lower levels of English proficiency, i.e. beginners are heavily influenced by their mother tongue. But as proficiency increases, most subjects are able to interpret English reflexives correctly. However similar progress is not observed w i t h respect to subject-orientation. I n the second experiment, learners a t the elementary level demonstrate a l ow sensitivity to constraints on syntactic movement in English. As the proficiency level increases, they become progressively more sensitive t o the number o f barriers crossed 一 a property o f subjacency. However even the most proficient subjects do not perform as we ll as the native speakers. Research 1 9