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The Acquisition of Word Order in English and Cantonese Interrogative
Sentences : A Singapore Case Study
Anna Kwan-Terry
RELC Journal 1986 17: 14
DOI: 10.1177/003368828601700102
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http://rel.sagepub.com/content/17/1/14
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The Acquisition of Word Order in English and Cantonese
Interrogative Sentences : A Singapore Case Study *
Anna Kwan-Terry
National University of
Singapore
Singapore
There have been a substantial number of studies on the acquisition
of interrogative structures by children learning English both as a first and
a second language. The present paper is yet another study of the same
nature except that here the study is made in the Singapore context where
many children, from an early age, are exposed to at least two languages,
of which the children’s ethnic language is one, and English is in many
cases the other. In the case of children of Chinese origin, this ethnic or
native language is often a Chinese dialect, e.g. Hokkien, Teochew,
Cantonese. In this paper, attention is therefore paid not only to how the
subject in the present study acquired the word order system for
interrogative sentences in English, but also how he acquired the same for
interrogative sentences in Cantonese which is his ethnic language or
native dialect. The focus of this paper is how the simultaneous
acquisition of two languages as different as English and Cantonese
affected the acquisition process, especially in relation to word order, and
under what conditions interlanguage transfer occurred.
The
Subject and the Data
The present paper has arisen from a longitudinal study of the
simultaneous acquisition of English and Cantonese by a pre-school child
in Singapore. The subject of the study is Elvoo, the younger of two
children from a middle-class family of Chinese origin. He was 3;6 when
the study was begun and systematic collection of data ceased when he
was 5;0. Until he was one year old, Elvoo was exposed to only one
language, Cantonese, which was spoken by everyone at home. From his
parents and his older sister, he heard a kind of Cantonese which was mixed
with a good number of lexical words from English, while from his
grandparents and the maid who lived in the same household, he heard a
&dquo;purer&dquo; form of Cantonese unadulterated by English words. From the
age of 1;0, English was added to the home and Elvoo became
*I would like to thank RELC for the research fellowship I was given
which has enabled me to carry out a longitudinal study on the
simultaneous acquisition of English and Chinese by a pre-school child in
Singapore. The present paper is a result of the study undertaken during
the term of the fellowship.
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simultaneously exposed to English and Cantonese. Cantonese, in its
mixed as well as unmixed forms, continued to be used by Elvoo’s parents
and grandparents when conversing with the child. English was at this
time introduced on account of the departure of the Cantonese-speaking
maid and the arrival of a Filipino maid. The new maid did not speak any
Cantonese and had just enough simple English to enable her to
communicate with other members in the household. It can be said that
Poupee, Elvoo’s sister older by six years, was the one responsible for
bringing English into the home in any substantial way. This was because
apart from the week-day mornings when she was away at school, she
spent nearly all the remaining time in the company of her younger
brother and the maid, among whom the medium of communication was
English, as this was the only common language they had. Of the three,
Poupee was the most proficient in the language and so the English used
by the other two was modelled on her use of the language. Poupee had in
her command at least two varieties of English : the first was a somewhat
more standard or acrolectal variety which she partly learned in the
formal setting of the classroom and partly acquired during her one year
sojourn in England at the age of five a variety which she used only on
the rare occasions she spoke with her parents’ English-speaking friends
or with native English-speaking children
and the second was a variety
somewhere on the lower end of the Singapore English continuum, a
variety widely used among school children in Singapore. It was this
second variety, the variety spoken by her peers, which Poupee
introduced into the home for use with Elvoo and the maid and which
became their model. It is important to point out that despite the more
acrolectal variety of English spoken by the parents, it was not the parents’
particular variety the child learned to speak, but a more
basilectal/mesoletal variety commonly used by Singapore school
children. In this way, Elvoo was not unlike many other children in
Singapore whose first introduction and main exposure to English are
through older siblings bringing the school playground variety of English
to essentially Chinese dialect-speaking homes.
--
--
be said that between 1:0 and 3;6 before the child attended
exposure to English and Cantonese was roughly
balanced. The balance in exposure was later tipped on the side of English
when Elvoo started attending nursery school at 3;6 and later kindergarten
at 4.6. At both the nursery school and the kindergarten, the medium of
communication was predominantly English, although about half an hour
out of the two-and-a-half hours every day was devoted to story-telling in
Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin Chinese, with some Hokkien, was also used
occasionally by some of the children in speaking with each other, either in
whole sentences or as code-switched expressions in essentially Enlgish
sentences. It can be seen from the above that it was in a kind of bilingual
It
nursery
can
school, Elvoo’s
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environment that the child was brought up, an environment
monly found in middle-class homes in Singapore.
quite
com-
Systematic data collection began when Elvoo was 3;6 and ceased
when he was 5;0, although notes on his use of the two languages
continued to be taken sporadically after 5;0. The data is principally in the
form of cassette recordings, supplemented by observational data as it
was found that the child’s most interesting linguistic manoevres did not
always succeed in being recorded. All the recordings were made in a
naturalistic setting and in comparable situations when the child was
engaged in everyday activities like having a meal, taking a bath, watching
television, reading a picture book, playing or reporting to his parents on
events of the day. As a main emphasis in the collection of the data was the
naturalistic setting, the duration of each recording session was variable,
determined largely by the child’s inclination to speak, and ranged from
15 minutes to 45 minutes per session. The emphasis on the naturalistic
setting also meant that the language used during the recording sessions
was not entirely within the researcher’s control. An attempt, however,
was made at eliciting an equal amount of data on each language for each
time period.’ On the whole, data on each of the two languages was collected on roughly fortnightly intervals and for each time period, there
was at least about 30 minutes of recorded data for each language.
Position of the
Interrogative Word in Adult English and Cantonese
Where word order in interrogative sentences in English and
Cantonese is concerned, two points are of special interest : one is the
position of the wh- or interrogative word and the other is the juxtaposition of the verbal element. I will look at the position of the interrogative word and the juxtaposition of the verbal element in both the
polar or yes/no questions and the interrogative word or wh- questions.
To understand the process Elvoo went through in acquiring word
order in interrogative sentences in both English and Cantonese and the
kind of transfer which took place, it is useful first to look briefly at the
word order in adult interrogative sentences in the two languages. We will
first look at the interrogative-word or wh- questions. Cancino, Rosansky
and Schumann’ have summarised the transformational rules for whquestions in English as follows :
1. Base: (can be exemplified by the sentence):
He - is
going where (someplace)
-
2.
-
Preposing: where - he
-
is
-
going
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(wh-word is
moved to the front of the
string)
3. Inversion : where - is
he - going?
(The auxilliary verb is moved in front of the
-
subject).
In other words, an interrogative word or wh- question in English is
characterised by two features : the pre-posing of the interrogative word
and the inversion of the subject and the verb or its auxiliary.
Interrogative-word questions in adult Cantonese, on the other
hand, differ from their corresponding English sentences in two ways :
1. the interrogative is not preposed;
2. there in no subject-verb (or auxiliary verb) inversion.
Some
examples will make the point clear:
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It can be seen from the above that in sentences 1, 3, 5 and 7, where
the interrogative word fills the slot for the topic/subject of the sentence,
it retains the position in front of the verb as in the corresponding
declarative sentence. In sentences 2, 4 and 6, on the other hand, where
the interrogative word fills the slot for the object of the verb, it takes up a
position after the verb, again as in the corresponding declarative
sentence, and no pre-posing of the interrogative word is involved. In
sentences 8 and 9, the interrogative word k Jt. &dquo;where&dquo; is placed after
the verb 4b &dquo;go&dquo; and the locative verb ~ &dquo;be present at&dquo; respectively,
and not pre-posed as is the case in English. In sentences 10-16, where the
interrogative words are &dquo;why&dquo;, and &dquo;how&dquo; or &dquo;when&dquo;, the interrogative word invariably occurs before the verb, as is the case with their
parallel English interrogative sentences.
Position of the Interrogative Word in Elvoo’s Cantonese Sentences
At 3;6, Elvoo was using a wide range of Cantonese interrogativeword questions, with the interrogative words approximately placed in
different positions according to their functional roles in the sentences.
The following are some examples:33
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As sentences 1 and 2 in the above show, Elvoo was able to use R I
&dquo;Who&dquo; in both the subject/tpic as well as the object position, one
before and the other one after the finite verb. With k 4- &dquo;which&dquo; and
&dquo;what&dquo; (sentences 2 - 5), however, he was only able to use them in the
position of the object or objective complement, i.e. after the verb (the
verb may sometimes be deleted). Similarly, where ilL It &dquo;where&dquo; is
concerned, he was able to use it appropriately after the locative verb
&dquo;be present at&dquo; (sentences 6 and 7) with the whole locative expression
following the subject/topic. At this stage he had not as yet attempted the
use of the Cantonese equivalents of &dquo;which&dquo;, &dquo;what&dquo; and &dquo;where&dquo; in
the sentence-initial position as the topic/subjet. This is by no means
surprising, as this use is far from common and there is no example of such
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in the mother’s own speech in the data. Finally, there is the interrogative word of reason ,§, ~ &dquo;why&dquo; which Elvoo used appropriately in the
sentence-initial position (sentences 8 and 9). When Elvoo began to use the
interrogative word of manner .~ ~* &dquo;how&dquo; at 3;10, the sentence took the
following form with both topic/subject as well as the object deleted :
use
4* -wear?
how wear
&dquo;How do you put it on?&dquo;
The interrogative of time, both in English and in Cantonese, was
acquired until the child was 4; 10 when both appeared within a period
of less than a month. This late development was no doubt due to the slow
not
development of the concept of time.
The point I wish to make here is that where the Cantonese
interrogative-word questions involving &dquo;who&dquo;, &dquo;what&dquo;, &dquo;which&dquo;,
&dquo;where&dquo; and &dquo;why&dquo; are concerned, Elvoo had acquired the appropriate
patterns, at least those that are commonly used, by 3;6, and the acquisition had been done within the language itself, with no evidence of interference from English. It is highly likely that the ease with which Elvoo
acquired these patterns was facilitated by the fact that the Cantonese
interrogative-word question and its declarative counterpart are identical
in terms of word order and so no transposition is called for in acquiring
the interrogative as against the declarative patterns.
Position of the Interrogative Word in Elvoo’s
English Sentences
When it comes to word-order in Elvoo’s wh- questions in English,
the first question one would like to ask is : did Elvoo acquire the English
patterns with the ease he had with Cantonese? Were there any problems
presented by the pre-posing of the interrogative word, a feature present
in English L’ learners?
I will first look at the developmental pattern of children learning
as a first language. Does this pre-posing of the interrogative
word in English present any problem to them? Roger Brown (1968),
working with the well-known Harvard children, found that his L’1
learners first asked wh-questions with a pre-posed interrogative word, and
that there was no evidence of children making the wh- question in the
base-form, namely, the &dquo;He-is-going where?&dquo; form. In the early stages,
there was no subject-verb inversion and the questions took the form of
English
What the dollie have?
Where horse go?
Who that?
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For the purpose of comparison, I will also look at what researchers
have to say on English LZ2 learners with diverse first language
backgrounds. Ravem (1975) studying Norwegian-speaking children and
Hatch (1974) examining data from 401/ learners, found that the children
first used wh- questions with wh-word preposing but no subject-verb
inversion, a pattern, as has been pointed out, that applies to LZ learners
of English. Butterworth and Hatch (1978), studying adult Ll learners,
reached basically the same conclusion though he did find a few examples
of the type where the interrogative word was not pre-posed, like
Today is what?
You watch where?
You watch in television what?
This is for what?
He is who?
Interestingly, Ervin-Tripp (1974) reported that while most of her
American children learning French began using wh-word sentences with
a pre-posed wh-word followed by the nuclear sentence order (i.e. no
inversion of subject and verb), the &dquo;older children displaced the question
word to preserve nuclear order&dquo; .6 It is perhaps significant that it was the
older children (in Ervin-Tripp’s study) or adults (in Butterworth and
Hatch’s study) who were more prone to maintaining the nuclear order in
wh- questions. Is it possible that the tendency to preserve the declarative
order is the result of associating the interrogative sentence with its
declarative counterpart, an association resulting from cerebration and
therefore more likely to be observed among older children and adults?
Returning to Elvoo, it is interesting to note that Elvoo, unlike L,
and L2 Enlgish learners reported on by researchers, did not begin using
wh- questions by pre-posing all the interrogative words. His whquestions formed with &dquo;who&dquo;, &dquo;what&dquo; and &dquo;where&dquo; produced at 3 ;6 3 ;9 fell into 2 groups : in one the wh-word was preposed, and in the
other, it was not :
A. Preposed wh-words
Who’s that? (3;8)
What’s that? (3;6)
What’s it? (3;7)
What’s this? (3; 7)
Where’s it (3;6)
Where’s the tree? (3 ; 6)
Where’s your mummy and daddy?
Where’s the teddy bear? (3;9)
(3;9)
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B.
Unpre-posed wh-words
You are doing what? (3;6)
You are eating what? (3;9)
This is for making what? (3;9)
Your name is what? (3;9)
@ @ is where ? (3;9)
You’re going (to) where? (3;9)
We are going to eat where? (3;9)
Looking at group A and group B, it would appear that what Elvoo
had acquired at this stage (3;6 - 3.9) was not the pre-posing rule, for if he
had acquired it, he would not have produced the group B sentences. An
examination of the sentences in A shows that the questions belong to a
limited number of formulaic or prefabricated types. The &dquo;who&dquo;
questions carried the wh-word with the contracted copula - i.e. &dquo;who’s&dquo;
-followed by one single pronoun, the pronoun that. The &dquo;what&dquo;
questions took only one form, namely, &dquo;what’s&dquo; (with the contracted
copula) followed by one of the pronouns &dquo;this&dquo;, &dquo;that&dquo; or &dquo;it&dquo;. The
&dquo;where&dquo; questions had the contracted copula appended to the wh-word
followed by either the pronoun &dquo;it&dquo; or a noun phrase (e.g. the tree, the
teddy bear, your mummy and daddy). I would like to suggest here that
these formulaic questions were acquired principally through imitation, a
process assisted by the frequency of occurrence of these particular
questions and their unvaried forms. There might be a certain degree of
rule application in that with the &dquo;what&dquo; questions, the pronoun was
variable, and with the &dquo;where&dquo; questions, the last constituent could be
either a pronoun or any single or compound noun phrase. In this respect,
he had acquired the word order within English itself, without any
influence or transfer from Cantonese.
Apart from these formulaic questions, however, the wh-word was
pre-posed. The questions in group B belong to the non-formulaic
category and here, the nuclear or declarative order was retained. The rule
not
that Elvoo was following here is the rule of the base or declarative
sentence, and it is also the rule in the corresponding interrogative
sentences in Cantonese.
So as far as the position of the wh-word is concerned, Elvoo’s first
wh- questions in English differed markedly from those of other learners,
be they L’ or U learners. The reason for Elvoo’s difficulty or slowness in
preposing the interrogative word was probably the persistence or transfer
of the Cantonese word order, possibly facilitated by the word order in
the base or declarative sentence in English. Of the two factors, the
former, transfer from Cantonese, seems to have played a more promi-
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nent role as L’ English children who are also open to influence from the
declarative sentence word order are not affected in this way and do not,
judging from studies made, share this difficulty in pre-posing the whword. It is highly probable, however, that in Elvoo’s case, the existence
of the nuclear order within English itself probably operated in favour of
the transfer from Cantonese. It is significant that Huang and Hatch,
5;5 learning
studying their Taiwanese-speaking subject aged 5;0
English, reported the same combination of imiatation and ruleformation in their subject’s early wh-questions :
-
&dquo;Since he heard so many &dquo;whats&dquo; and &dquo;where’s&dquo; questions, it
appears he learned these by imitation and the ’s was not the copula
but part of the interrogative word. While he learned the question
form by imitation, he soon began substituting new nouns freely
following the interrogative maker ..... he learned to form such
questions by a combination of imitation and rule formation, it is
clear that they were learned as non-transformational routines. He did
not go through a stage of learning to front the interrogative word,
then acquire subject-verb inversion, then contract the copula&dquo;.88
This finding of Huang and Hatch no doubt substantiates the claim
that in Elvoo’s case, transfer was at work, accounting for his relative
difficulty in acquiring the pre-posing rule in English.
It was only much later, at 4;3, that Elvoo began to pre-pose the whword, beginning with &dquo;where&dquo; as in:
Where I will hide? (4;3)
Where you got this? (4;3)
The
pre-posing
of the wh-word
was
later extended to included
clause, when Elvoo began to use such clauses at 4;8 :
Then the dinosaur don’t know where the froggie goes.
I don’t know where he goes. (4;8)
I know where the sun. (4;8)
(4;8)
can be taken as a case of generalisation when the wh- word
was extended to included clauses. With the pre-posing of
rule
preposing
the
&dquo;where&dquo;,
interrogative word &dquo;what&dquo; too, began to be pre-posed at
about the same time, as in
This
What you want to do? (4;~
See what we’ll make then. (4;9)
Rule-formation had
now come
into play with the
pre-posing
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of
!>VLavVlll
VL>LVr!>VLVIVY·
...
&dquo;where&dquo;, then &dquo;what&dquo;, which too became pre-posed, though not consistently. We can say that this pre-posing of the wh-word represented a
break
or a
step away from the influence of Cantonese.
Yet, interestingly, just as Elvoo began to prepose some of the
English wh-words in English sentences, his Cantonese wh- questions
became affected and he produced sentences like:9
Here Elvoo not only applied the pre-posing rule to included clauses
within the same language, but also over-extended it to cover corresponding sentences in another language, illustrating the existence or reality
of inter-language transfer. Such pre-posed Cantonese wh-words,
resulting in unacceptable sentences, occurred alongside with unpreposed
ones. Just recently, at 6;6, he was heard to say consecutively:
* ~~ ~~ ~ ~‘ T.i ~~’ ~ ? ~f.i ~~’ ° z~. ~ ~
Mother, which
one
you like? You like which one?
* ’~r /~ ~(,~ t~ o ?
Which
one
you like?
In the first and the last sentence, the wh-word was pre-posed and
incorrectly placed, while in the middle sentence, it was not preposed and thus placed appropriately. One wonders if Elvoo was
consciously aware of the different positioning of the wh-word.
Interestingly, the Cantonese interrogative word of place, k fi &dquo;where&dquo;,
was not pre-posed in this way. A possible explanation for this is that in
adult Cantonese, both 4b -If &dquo;what&dquo; and 4- gr &dquo;who&dquo; do take up the
hence
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initial
position in a sentence when they function as the subject/topic,
whereas ~ 1i &dquo;where&dquo; is rarely placed initially and certainly not in the
mother’s speech to the child. Another possible reason is that the
Cantonese interrogative word of place ib fa, &dquo;where&dquo;, is alway preceded
by either a locative verb or an action verb to form a locative expression.
Hence placing this interrogative word in the sentence-initial position
would create a problem as to where to place the verb. Here it can be said
that the word order system in Cantonese itself hinders or discourages
such
a
transfer and further supports the claim that transfer is often
operative only under favourable conditions.
Subject-Verb
Inversion in Elvoo’s
was
mentioned earlier
English Wh-Questions
°
that one feature characterising adult
English interrogative sentences is the inversion of the subject and the
verb or its auxiliary and that this is a feature which is acquired by L’ as
well as most LZ children only after they have acquired the pre-posing of
the interrogative or wh-word. Researchers have noted that children
develop questions beginning with &dquo;what&dquo; or &dquo;where&dquo; plus the
contracted copula fairly early on, but some, for example D. Ingram,
Cancino, Rosansky and Schumann’ as well as Huang and Hatch&dquo; have
expressed doubt as to whether questions beginning with &dquo;what’s&dquo; or
&dquo;where’s&dquo; are really cases of conscious subject-verb inversion. As far as
Elvoo’s use of &dquo;what’s&dquo; and &dquo;where’s&dquo; is concerned, my view is that
these were unanalysed chunks, each perceived by the child as one single
wh-word, and that there was no separation of subject and verb and no
inversion involved. I offer two reasons for this interpretation. First,
during the period 3;6 to 3;9, the copula invariably appeared in the
contracted form appended to &dquo;what&dquo; and &dquo;where&dquo; and there was no
occurrence of the copula in its uncontracted form, separated from the
wh- words concerned. So it was highly likely that the child perceived
&dquo;what’s&dquo; and &dquo;where’s&dquo; as variants of &dquo;what&dquo; and &dquo;where&dquo;, the
former used when the wh-word was followed by other constituents and
the latter used when the wh-word was used on its own to form a oneword question. It was only around 4 ;0 that &dquo;what’s&dquo; and &dquo;where’s&dquo;
were separated into &dquo;what is&dquo; and &dquo;where is&dquo; and &dquo;where is&dquo; came
after the development of the uncontracted copula in declarative
sentences which took place at around 3;9:
It
1. No, that one is not for that. (3;9)
2. That one is for make a horse. (3;9)
3.... because it is so yummy. (3;9)
4. Because the aeroplane always so, is always
5. Shark is good; whale is not good. (3;11)
Sentence 4 is
so
fast.
(3;10)
particularly interesting in that self-correction reflects
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a
clear awareness of the appropriateness of is in the sentence. Previously,
before this age, the copula, whether contracted or uncontracted, was not
used and Elvoo would say :
This is my book.
Why
so
(3;6)
big? (3;6)
The auxiliary is appeared
uncontracted copula, at 4;0 :
shortly after the appearance of the
The whale is coming. (4;0)
Then the whale is going to eat you.
The dinsosaur is sleeping. (4;0)
(4;0)
However, both the auxiliary and the copula were
at 4;3, there were occasional sentences like :
The girl making the sandcastle.
not stabilised and even
(4; 3)
and
That funny.
(4;3)
From 4;0 onwards, while Elvoo continued to use some &dquo;what’s&dquo; and
&dquo;where’s&dquo; forms in asking questions, he also used forms like :
What is this? (4;0)
Where is it? (4;6)
Where is the cake? (4;0)
Where is my aeroplane cup?
Where is the man? (4;6)
(4;3)
Superficially, the above examples suggest that Elvoo had acquired
subject-verb inversion at this stage alongside with the separation of
copula from the wh-word. More detailed examination of the data,
however, suggests that what Elvoo had developed at this point was only
the separation of the wh-word and the copula (which previously
appeared in the contracted form), so that what was once &dquo;what’s&dquo; or
the
the
&dquo;where’s&dquo;
was
broken down into &dquo;what is&dquo;
or
&dquo;where is&dquo;. Evidence in
support of the view that Elvoo had not yet developed the generalised
inversion is the fact that this apparent inversion was restricted to a very
small number of fixed or formulaic questions, principally those derived
from the &dquo;what’s&dquo; and &dquo;where’s&dquo; questions and questions containing
&dquo;is it&dquo; and &dquo;are you&dquo; forms to be discussed later. Most of the other nonformulaic questions did not contain inversion. In addition to those
questions given under group B which illustrate the absence of inversion,
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the following questions can be added to support the point :
This one is what? (4;3)
The brown one is what? (4;5)
Why this woman is here? (4;3)
Why the ant is disappear? (4;3
Why the baby crying? (3;6)
Why my house is so fast turning? (3;10)
Why you’re taking the dirty elephant? (3;9)
Why you are so silly? (4;0)
Why it cannot move? (3;7)
Why this dinosaur can eat the crab? (4;3)
Why this doggie will bite me? (3; 11)
Why you must to go? (4;0)
Why you don’t talk to me? (3;6)
Why this doggie don’t like to stand? (3;9)
Why your daddy and mummy don’t like to come here?
Why you got two video? (3;9)
Why you want to die? (3;9)
Why she pinch you? (4;0)
(3;9)
Why your boat sunk? (4;6)
As I mentioned
earlier, apart from the &dquo;what is&dquo; and &dquo;where is&dquo;
questions, there were questions with &dquo;is it&dquo;, &dquo;are you&dquo; etc. which were
also apparently inverted. These &dquo;is it&dquo;, &dquo;are you&dquo; etc. inversions
appeared as early as 3;6. In order to understand how these inverted
forms were acquired, I will first turn to examine the yes/no questions
Elvoo used. In these as in the questions given under group B, there was
neither inversion
nor
evidence of the
use
of the do/did support in such
wh-questions.’4
Subject-Verb Inversion in Elvoo’s English Yes/No Questions
As other researchers have noted, the earliest interrogative sentences
children make take the form of a base sentence spoken with a rising intonation. This was also the form of Elvoo’s earliest interrogative sentences.
Apart from the intonation questions, there were at 3;6 some yes/no
questions where the subject and the verb were at least apparently
inverted. But as with the wh- questions, such apparent inversions were
restricted to a few set or formulaic expressions, namely, &dquo;is it&dquo;, &dquo;can
I/you&dquo;, and &dquo;are you&dquo;.
(i)
Is it
The combination &dquo;is it&dquo; is particularly interesting. There was a
notable characteristic about the way the combination was pronounced:
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the two words were spoken without any pause in between and sounded as
though they formed one single word. Elvoo was recorded to have used
this combination as early as 3;6:
-
Is it a giant? (3;6)
Why is it not moving?
(3;6)
It would appear that in these
questions, &dquo;is it&dquo; was perceived by the child
single word, an interpretation supported by the way he pronounced
the expression. At 3;9, Elvoo seemed to feel the need to provide a
topic/grammatical subject and some of his &dquo;is it&dquo; questions then took
on a new form, with a separate topic/grammatical subject provided
additionally, as in
as one
The second one, is it the small one?
That, is it the front? (3;9)
The hole, is it here? (3;9)
Elvoo, is it dead? (4;0)
It would appear that at
(3;9)
3;9, Elvoo had formed the rule that
interrogative sentence in English could be formed by
topic/subject
interrogative word &dquo;is
--
it&dquo;
--
an
complement.
a later stage, he seemed to feel the need not only to add a
topic/grammatical subject, but also a separate verb, thus treating &dquo;is it&dquo;
as a pure interrrogative word. The following are some examples of this
new question form with &dquo;is it&dquo; functioning as an interrogative signal, a
separate topic/grammatical subject and a separate verb:
Is it the blood will come out and then the place will dirty? (4;3)
Is it inside the chair there it died? (4;3)
Is it Freddie is No. 8? (4;6)
At
(ii) Can
+ Pronoun
Another inverted combination which
pronoun form
as
appeared
at
3;6 is the can &
in:
Can I have this motorcycle? (3;6)
Can I have that? (3;6)
Je-Je, can you make some sound? (3;6)
Can you talk to me? (3;6)
Can this the motor-cycle go in this beach? (3;6)
6. Sardine fish, sardine fish, sardine fish can swim?
Sardine fish can they swim? (3;9)
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
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7.
8.
9.
10.
I like this one, can I? (3;6)
I want some sweets, can I? (3;7)
I want to see the crocodiles in the TV, can I?
Can I finish all the Chinese cake, can I? (3;8)
(3;7)
Questions 1-4 in the above show that Elvoo had no difficulty placing the
pronominal subject in relation to the modal auxiliary at 3;6. At 3;7, he
also developed the use of this combination as a tag- question, as illustrated in sentences 7-10. However, he was not able to cope with nonpronominal subjects. Hence where the subject had to be explicitly
specified through the use of a noun, he seemed to have difficulty placing
it. This is manifested in sentences 5 and 6 where, instead of replacing the
pronoun in &dquo;can this&dquo; (sentence 5) or &dquo;can they&dquo; (sentence 6) with the
noun he wanted to use, he kept the pronouns and provided the nouns
&dquo;the motor-cycle&dquo; and the &dquo;sardine fish&dquo; additionally. Again this seems
to show that for Elvoo, the can + pronoun sequence was, at least in part,
a pre-fabricated or formulaic expression learned through imitation on
account of its frequency of occurrence and that he had not acquired the
generalised subject-verb inversion rule. In other words, he learned the
can + pronoun combination through imitation in the same way he learned
&dquo;is it&dquo; or &dquo;what’s&dquo; or &dquo;where’s&dquo; through imitation.
(iii) Are you
While Elvoo inverted the pronouns &dquo;I&dquo; or &dquo;you&dquo; and the auxiliary
&dquo;can&dquo; consistently from 3;6, he was less consistent with the combination
&dquo;you&dquo; + &dquo;are&dquo; which he inverted only occasionally. As early as 3;6,
he produced a limited number of sentences like :
Why
you so yakky? (3;6)
you doing? (3;7)
Are you going to Louis and Benji?
Are you wet? (4;3)
are
What
are
(3;9)
Alongside with the above, he also produced
sentences
like :
taking the dirty elephant? (3;9)
Why you
are
Why
are so
and
you
silly, girl? (4;0)
The existence of both the inverted and the uninverted forms of &dquo;you&dquo;
and &dquo;are&dquo; in Elvoo’s interrogative sentences suggests that for the period
of 3;6 to 4;0, he had not sufficiently stabilised the use of the inverted
form, although from about 3;9 to 4;0, the contrast between the
declarative and the interrogative forms probably began to sieve through
to the child as he was able to produce contrastive pairs like the following
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E:
Are you going to school? I will go to
in my school also. Did you
like to put back the, the
yeah - because you are going to school
-
-
now. -
(telephone conversation) (3;9)
.
and also
E:
Are you
a
naughty boy?
You are, hee - hee.
(4;0)
The conclusion one is tempted to draw from looking at Elvoo’s use
of &dquo;is it&dquo;, &dquo;can I/you&dquo; and &dquo;are you’ is that between the age of 3;6 and
5;0, he had acquired the use of .the above prefabricated expressions
involving pronouns through imitation. However, he had not at this age
acquired the subject-verb inversion rule as such, for he was not able to
invert the subject and the verb where the subject was non-pronominal.
This conclusion is in line with the conclusion relating to Elvoo’s acquisition of wh-word pre-posing rule. While he was able to &dquo;pre-pose&dquo; the interrogative words &dquo;who&dquo; and &dquo;what&dquo; in certain pre-fabricated questions involving the closed class of pronouns and to &dquo;pre-pose&dquo; &dquo;where&dquo;
in relation to a variety of noun phrases, he was not able to apply the preposing rule as such to questions outside this limited range. In order
words, the apparent &dquo;inversions&dquo; was the result of imitation, imitating
frequently heard, prefabricated expressions, involving largely the closed
class of pronouns.
Elvoo’s Acquisition of the Do-Support Question Form
There is evidence in the data to show that Elvoo began using
&dquo;don’t&dquo; (always in the contracted form) and &dquo;did not&dquo; (always in the
uncontracted form) in declarative sentences at 3;6 and the frequency increased significantly at 3;9. &dquo;Do&dquo;, however, was not used at this stage.
The first do-support question form appeared at 3;7 and took the past
tense form &dquo;did&dquo;, as exemplified in
Did you kill the policeman there? (3 ;7)
Did you like to put back the
yeah Did you buy for me? (4;3)
-
(3;9)
points are of note with these first do-support questions. First, the
did-support was used only when the subject/topic was the pronoun
&dquo;you&dquo;. When the subject/topic was other than this pronoun, the didsupport was not used. Second, the combination &dquo;did you&dquo; was by no
means stablised during the period 3;7 to 4;10 and &dquo;did you&dquo; questions
were used alongside with questions without the did-support, e.g.
You want to die? (3;9)
You got two video? (3;9)
Third, the did-support seems to have been developed first in the yes/no
questions. Even as late as 4;10, there was no evidence of do/did-support
in the wh- questions.
Three
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The first do-support questions (in the present tense) appeared
least one year after the first appearance of the &dquo;did&dquo; questions, at 4;9:
at
You lost
your -~ -~ , do you want? (4;9)
(along-side with &dquo;You want to lost your -k? -k??&dquo; (4;9)
You want to sit in my boat? Do you want, ~ ~ ? (4;9)
**,do you stick here? (4;10)
Again, as with the &dquo;did&dquo; question form, this do-support was used only
when the subject/topic was a pronoun (usually &dquo;you&dquo; but not necessarily).
With non-pronominal subjects, the do-support was not used:
Is Mama want Chinese newspaper or English newspaper?(4;10)
Is this place have ghost? (5;0)
The conclusion again is that Elvoo had not acquired the true do-support
as a generalised interrogative form. The basis for making this claim is that
Elvoo used &dquo;do&dquo; and &dquo;did&dquo; to form questions only when the subject
was a pronoun, but not when the subject was a noun. In other words, he
had memorized the pre-fabricated do(did) plus pronoun form on account
of its high frequency of occurrence but he had not acquired the dosupport rule in general
as
he could not apply it to sentences where the
subject was a noun.
Juxtaposition
of the Verbal Element in Adult Yes/No
Questions
in
Cantonese
So far, it would appear that as late as 5;0, Elvoo had not acquired
the subject-verb inversion rule for English interrogative sentences,
though he did use a substantial number of apparently inverted forms involving pronouns as a result of imitating pre-fabricated expressions. A
question one would like to ask is whether Elvoo faced the same difficulty
in juxtaposing verbal elements in his Cantonese sentences to signal interrogation. Before this question can be answered, it is necessary first to
look at the juxtaposition device in Cantonese to signal a question. In
adult Cantonese, yes/no questions are formed in two ways, by the use of
a sentence-final interrogative particle or by juxtapoing the affirmative
and negative forms of a verbal element. I will concentrate on the latter as
I am here primarily interested in the child’s ability to juxtapose words to
signal interrogation, a device that is also used in English though in a
somewhat different form. In Cantonese yes/no questions, the juxtaposed
element can be a main verb, an auxiliary verb, or an aspect/tense
marker. It takes the form of X-not-X and occupies the position of the
corresponding verb, auxiliary verb or aspect/tense marker in the
declarative sentence. Alternatively, the juxtaposed verbal element may
form a tag-question. Here are some examples of yes/no questions formed
by juxtaposition:
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The auxillary 1~ &dquo;can&dquo;, however, differs from other auxiliary verbs in
that it does not juxtapose with its negative form to form questions and it
does not occur before the main verb but after it. A question with this
auxiliary verb takes the form:
As the above
example shows, it is the main verb i3L &dquo;wash&dquo; that is jux-
taposed and the auxiliary verb comes after the juxtaposed verb.
(iii) Juxtaposition of an aspectltense marker
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Juxtaposition
of the Verbal Element in Elvoo’s Yes/No
Questions in
Cantonese
It has been pointed out that Elvoo had considerable difficulty in
acquiring the interrogative device of subject-verb inversion as far as
English was concerned, though he was able to use a substantial number
of apparently inverted prefabricated expressions involving pronouns.
Elvoo exhibited the same difficulty with acquiring the Cantonese
interrogative device of juxtaposition involving the verbal elements
mentioned above. At 3;6, Elvoo juxtaposed two specific auxiliary verbs
to form questions, namely the auxiliary verbs
,~~. &dquo;be&dquo; and 4T
&dquo;can&dquo;,
as
As these
in
examples show, Elvoo
was
able to juxtapose the auxiliary verb
&dquo;be&dquo; ~ appropriately to form questions (sentences 1 and 2). He was also
able to juxtapose the positive and negative forms of 0% &dquo;can&dquo; appro-
priately to form tag-questions (sentence 3) just as he formed tagquestions withe &dquo;be&dquo; (sentence 2). However, when it came to forming
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&dquo;can&dquo; in the main sentence, he failed to see that 1%t
&dquo;can&dquo; differ from &dquo;be&dquo; in that it cannot juxtapose with its negative
form and that the tag-question form of 1%t &dquo;can&dquo; cannot be transferred
to the main sentence either. He produced as a result sentences 4 and 5
which are unacceptable.
questions with 4*
Besides these two auxiliary verbs, the only other verbal forms
Elvoo juxtaposed to form questions were the frequently recurrent verb of
existence/possession * &dquo;have&dquo; and the equally frequently recurrent
tense/aspect marker % , both of which juxtapose with their negative
form fé.. The verb of existence/possession was first juxtaposed with its
negative form to produce questions at 3; 10, while the tense/aspect
marker was first used in this way at 4;3 :
The
above is that Elvoo’s ability to juxtaquestions was limited again to a small
number of high frequency items, like the auxiliary verbs, a tense/aspect
marker and the verb of existence/possession. This suggests that what
Elvoo had acquired was not the generalised verb-not-verb rule for he was
not able to apply this juxtaposition to the open class of lexical verbs. He
was never heard to produce sentences like
m ~ .4;
point
to note from the
pose verbal elements to form
,,
~< -
formed by the juxtaposition of members from the open class of lexical
verbs (the verb &dquo;be&dquo; *, and the verb of existence/possession being
exceptions). It would seem that what Elvoo had acquired was acquired
through imitation, facilitated no doubt by the high frequency of
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occurrence of the items concerned, which alone accounted for the small
number of items he was able to manipulate in this way. This compares
very interestingly with Elvoo’s use of subject-verb inversion to ask
questions in English. Such inversion, as has been pointed out, was
limited in Elvoo’s case to a closed class of pronouns functioning as the
subject. When the subject was from the open class of nouns, he was able
to apply inversion (except in the case of the interrogative word
&dquo;where&dquo;). This again points to the prominent role of imitation in
acquiring the specific forms under discussion. The conclusion, therefore,
is that while Elvoo was able to invert subject and verb in forming English
interrogative sentences and juxtapose the positive and negative forms of
a verbal element in forming yes/no questions in Cantonese, the reordering of the linguistic forms in both cases was learned through
imitating a finite number of frequently recurrent forms. He had not as
yet acquired the word-ordering rule as a generalised interrogative device.
The difficulty Elvoo had in acquiring this rule, whether in English or
Cantonese, suggests that such re-ordering, involving the abstraction of
the concept of word order in a string of words, was difficult for the child.
Transfer of Juxtaposition Devices
It has been pointed out that where the position of interrogative
words is concerned, there is evidence of transfer from Cantonese to
English and vice-versa in Elvoo’s case. Is there any evidence of transfer
where juxtaposition of the verbal element is concerned, either from
English to Cantonese or vice-versa? It can be seen from the description
given above that where yes/no questions in either English or Cantonese
are concerned, the juxtaposition involving the verbal element was
learned within each language itself: in the case of English, it was with
the negative form of the verbal element itself. There is no evidence that
there was transfer from one language to the other, and it is possible that
the very different forms of juxtaposition in the two languages prohibited
rather than facilitated transfer. However, I am tempted to suggest that
the high frequency of questions taking the form of &dquo;... or not?&dquo; in
Elvoo’s English speech (and in the speech of Singapore speakers of
English in general) could be related to the existence of a parallel interrogative form in Cantonese (or other local Chinese languages in the case of
other Singapore speakers). Examples of questions taking this form are :
You want to go or not?
(3;10)
This nice or not? (3; i 1)
This very nice, you want or not? (4;0)
Teddy bear come this way or not? (4;2)
Let me see you have or not? (4;6)
You help me la, can or not?’6 (4;10)
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Admittedly, this or not pattern is found in standard English itself,
Do you want to go
or
as
in
not?
And no doubt the existence of this pattern in standard English could
have induced the use of this form by the child (or by other Singapore
speakers of English), yet the high frequency of use of questions of this
type leads one to suspect that the frequency might have been related to
the existence of a parallel juxtaposition pattern in Cantonese.
Undoubtedly there is close parallelism both semantically and structurally
between the Cantonese verb-not-verb interrogative pattern and the
English or not pattern. Semantically, both patterns offer a choice
between a positive or a negative answer, and structurally, both patterns
are formed by juxtaposing the positive and negative forms of the verb
(although in the case of the English version, the positive and negative
forms might be separated by other segmental units). It would be
reasonable to conclude therefore that while the existence of the or not
pattern in English -facilitated the child’s use of this particular pattern in
his English speech, the existence of a parallel pattern in Cantonese could
have further facilitated its use, thus resulting in the high frequency of use
of the pattern. The transfer, if this can be considered as transfer, was
indirect in that the English version did not take the unmodified verb-notverb pattern, which would have resulted in very un-English sounding
sentences like
You want not want to go?
Teddy bear has has not come this
way?
The very un-Englishness was likely to prohibit this direct, unmodified
transfer. Instead, the transfer took an indirect, modified form in which
the Cantonese juxtaposition of verbal elements is retained in the English
sentence but the negative form of the verb took on the English form and
the English &dquo;or&dquo; is added between the positive and the negative forms.
As for transfer from English to Cantonese, there is in the data no
evidence of transfer of subject-verb inversion or do-support to Elvoo’s
Cantonese sentences, and this is probably because of the absence of conditions favouring such transfer.
Notes
’.As it was not always possible to obtain the cooperation of Poupee in
data from Elvoo, the mother often had to initiate conversations in English with the subject to elicit the necessary English data.
While this was not entirely satisfactory as the normal medium of communication between the mother and the subject was Cantonese, the use
eliciting English
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of English was not totally unacceptable or strange to the child since the
mother was in the habit of using English with the child in the presence of
the Filipino maid or English-speaking friends.
2.Cancino, Rosansky and Schumann, &dquo;The Acquisition of English
Negatives and Interrogatives&dquo;, Working Papers on Bilingualism, No. 6,
80-96, rep. Evelyn Hatch (ed.), Second Language Acquisition, 1978,
207-230.
3.Since there are different &dquo;varieties&dquo; of Singapore English, it is difficult in some cases to determine if an English sentence produced by
Elvoo is acceptable or not, as judgement is very much based on the
&dquo;variety&dquo; of English Elvoo was supposed to speak. Hence his English utterances are not marked as being ill-formed or not. The problem of acceptability is much less acute with his Cantonese sentences and thus the
ill-formed Cantonese sentences he produced are marked by an asterisk.
Where his &dquo;Cantonese&dquo; sentences involve code-mixing or codeswitching, the judgement of acceptability is based on the grammar of the
base language, namely, Cantonese.
&dquo;.This sentence, where the verb ,# &dquo;be&dquo; is deleted, is
Cantonese.
a
well-formed
sentence in
S.Here both the topic/subject as well
result is again a well-formed sentence.
as
the verb
are
deleted and the
6.Ervin-Tripp, Susan. &dquo;Is Second Language Learning Like the
First?&dquo; TESOL Quarterly, 1974, 199. Admittedly the language the
American children were learning is French and not English or Cantonese,
yet it is nevertheless interesting to note that this tendency to preserve the
nuclear order is also found with children learning a very different
language from the two under discussion.
’.Taiwanese is a variety of Hokkien, another Chinese dialect in which
the interrogative words in questions are not preposed, as is the case with
Cantonese and other Chinese languages/dialects.
e. &dquo;A Chinese Child’s acquision of English&dquo; in E, Hatch (ed.), Second
Language Acquisition, 1978, 129-130.
9.lt should be pointed out that from 4;6 onwards, English was
definitely Elvoo’s dominant language, which probably contributed to his
transfer of the English word order to his Cantonese in this
case.
10 .C.f. p. 5 above.
’ ‘. &dquo;Fronting in Child Psychology&dquo;, Journal of Child Language, 1974,
1, 233-4.
‘2.&dquo;Acquisition
of English Negatives and Interrogatives&dquo;, Working
38
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Papers on Bilingualism, No. 6, 80-96.
&dquo;. &dquo;A Chinese Child’s Acquisition of English&dquo;, in Hatch, E. (ed.), Second Language Acquisition, 1978, 118-31.
’4.c.f. p. 26
tions.
on
the
&dquo;. ~ &dquo;cold&dquo; is
development of the do/did support in yes/no ques-
an
adjective which
is
a
subclass of the verb in Can-
tonese.
References
Brown, Roger. "The development of wh- questions in child speech",
Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behaviour, 1968, Vol. 7,
No. 2, 279-290.
Butterworth, G.A. and Hatch, E. "A spanish-speaking adolescent’s
acquisition of English syntax", E. Hatch (ed.), Second Language
Acquisition, Newbury House, Mass., 1978, 231-245.
Cancino, Rosansky and Schumann. "The acquisition of English
negatives and interrogatives", Working Papers on Bilingualism,
#6, 80-96. Ervin-Tripp, Susan. "Is second language learning like
the first?" TESOL Quaterly, 1974, 8, 11-128.
Hatch, Evelyn. "Are there second language learning-universals?" Working
Papers on Bilingualism, 1974, 3, 1-18.
Huang, J. and Hatch, E. "A Chinese child’s acquisition of English", E.
Hatch (ed.), Second Language Acquisition, Newbury House,
Mass., 1975, 118-131.
Ingram, D. "Fronting in Child Psychology", Journal of Child
Language, 1974, 1, 233-241.
Ravem, R. "The development of wh-questions in first and second
language learners", J. Schumann and N. Stenson (eds.), New
Frontiers in Second Language Learning, Rowley, Mass., 1975,
153-175.
Tyack, D. and Ingram, D. "Children’s Production and Comprehension
of Questions", Journal of Child Language, 1977, 4, 211-24.
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