On the Acquisition of Wh-Scope Marking in Korean-English Interlanguage

Abstract

This paper presents the data of wh-scope marking in Korean-English interlanguage. A cross-sectional elicited oral-translation task was carried out with sixty-seven Korean-speaking university students learning L2 English, to examine long-distance Ā-dependencies in complex wh-questions such as Who do you think bought the clothes?. The findings show: (1) Nearly half of the learner population who produced a biclausal structure exclusively depended on wh-scope marking such as *What do you think who bought the clothes? as an alternative to the intended complex wh-question. (2) The stage of a dual wh-chain of intra-clausal local Ā-dependencies for wh-scope marking predates the stage of a single chain of inter-clausal long-distance Ā-dependencies for complex wh-questions. (3) The learner population opting for complex wh-questions seems to have acquired a superior proficiency in target language to the learner population opting for wh-scope marking. Our data analyzed under the copy theory of movement (Chomsky 1995) fares better with the Indirect Dependency approach (IDA) proposed by Dayal (1994, 2000) than the Direct Dependency approach (DDA).