Acquisition of L2 English Restrictive Relative Clauses by L1 Thai Speakers: A Case of the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis

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Published: Jan 1, 2012

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Atipong Amornwongpeeti
Nattama Pongpairoj

Abstract

This paper investigates whether English restrictive relative clauses can be acquired by native speakers of Thai.  It is a semi-replication of Hawkins and Chan (187-226), who explored the acquisition of English restrictive relative clauses by two groups of L2 learners from different L1 backgrounds, Chinese and French.  It was concluded that, as L1 French, but not L1 Chinese, has the syntactic properties and morphology required for English restrictive relative clauses, e.g. wh-movement, the French subjects were able to acquire these clauses.  Moreover, they consistently performed better with increasing proficiency while the Chinese subjects failed to improve. The present study aims to test whether the Failed Functional Features Hypothesis (FFFH), as employed in the original work, can also account for the data of L1 Thai/L2 English learners.   A grammaticality judgment test was administered to 3 groups of L1 Thai undergraduates of different English proficiency levels.  The results showed that, with increasing English proficiency, the Thai subjects were more accurate in judging the (un)grammaticality of English restrictive relative clauses. In line with the FFFH, as it is assumed that Thai has a wh-movement - albeit covert (Panpothong 60) – and that the wh-feature in the specifier of CP has already been activated in the mental representation of L1 Thai speakers, English relative clauses are attainable for them.  Therefore, the FFFH is still successful in providing a satisfactory explanation for the results, thus further proving its validity.

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No. 1 (2012): Thoughts 2012
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Articles

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Author Biographies

Atipong Amornwongpeeti

Atipong Amornwongpeeti earned his B.A. in English (first-class honors) from the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, and is currently pursuing an M.A. in English linguistics at the same institute under an H.M. King Bhumibol Adulyadej’s 72nd Birthday Anniversary Scholarship. His areas of interest include second-language acquisition of English syntax, English phonology, and corpus linguistics.

Nattama Pongpairoj

Nattama Pongpairoj received her B.A. (English) (first-class honors) from Chulalongkorn University, M.A. (Linguistics) from the University of Oregon, and Ph.D. (Linguistics) from the University of York.  She is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University. Her research interests include interlanguage and L2 acquisition of functional morphology.

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