This study examined subject-auxiliary inversion errors in wh-questions produced by 88 Korean EFL elementary learners, focusing on whether types of wh-words and auxiliaries could affect inversion acquisition and whether explicit instruction on movement rules could facilitate this process. Guided writing tasks were used as a pretest and a posttest to analyze influence of wh-words and auxiliaries on learners’ inversion in the pretest and effects of instruction on movement rules in the posttest. Results showed that both whwords and auxiliaries significantly influenced learners’ inversion acquisition. Learners struggled more with why-questions than with what-questions, which were selected as representatives of adjunct and argument wh-questions, respectively. More inversion errors occurred in wh-questions requiring do-support than in those involving auxiliary be or modal will, although no significant difference was found between be and will. Experimental lessons with brief explicit instruction on auxiliary movement during regular classes significantly improved learners’ inversion accuracy, particularly in dosupport questions, which posed the greatest challenge in the pretest.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the early wh-movement acquisition of English native speakers from the perspective of Minimalist Program. Guasti and Rizzi(1996) propose the null auxiliary hypothesis that the structure of the questions where the verb is inflected with -ing includes a null auxiliary, the counterpart of the lexical be. They draw a parallel between the null auxiliary and the early null subject. Rizzi(1997) proposes that the CP system, like the IP system, is layered. ForceP is the highest project which determines the clausal type and FocusP's specifier is the landing site for wh-operators and whose head hosts inverted auxiliaries. Guasti and Rizzi(1996) argue that children's auxless questions are structures truncated below ForceP. Thus, the null auxiliary, like other early phenomena, finds its source in the mechanism of clausal truncation. The phenomena of early language acquisition reflects the process of acquiring functional categories as children grow.

Lim, Sang-bong. 1998. Acquisition of Subject-auxiliary Inversion in Child English and Optimality Theory. Studies in Modern Grammar 14, 349-364. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the patterns of subject-auxiliary inversion in child English questions can be explained by the constraints in Grimshaw`s(1992) Optimality Theory account of inversion patterns in adult English questions. I briefly review the treatment of subject-auxiliary inversion within the Minimalist Theory. The theory claims that subject-auxiliary inversion is a subcase of head movement that moves an auxiliary across the sentence to the head of the presentential complementizer(CP) position in nonselected CPs. In this paper I try to show that the stages of acquisition in subject-auxiliary inversion and the patterns of inversion in child English. And I also show that an Optimality-Theoretic approach can explain several facts regarding the pattern of auxiliary inversion in child English. In addition, this paper argues that the constraints ranking of child English must be different from those of adult English to capture the characteristics of subject-auxiliary inversion in child English.

Lee, Sang-oh. 1998. Auxiliary Inversion of Wh-interrogative Questions and Checking. Studies in Modern Grammatical Theories 12, 125-139. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the auxiliary inversion and its checking relation of wh-interrogative questions in English in the light of various assumptions made by minimalist theory in linguistics. Following the basic hypothesis that the auxiliary inversion in wh-questions depends on the strength of the head C of CP, the requirement that the C of CP be filled by some element fulfills the operation of auxiliary inversion by being attracted (adjoined) to the question affix(Q). Furthermore, the data drawn from Belfast English and the successive cyclic A´-movement of wh-expressions are used to discuss the function of the specifiers of CP containing overt or null elements, which play important roles in explaining the auxiliary inversion in wh-interrogative questions. The constructions such as subject questions, non-interrogative embedded clauses, and non-interrogative questions are also discussed for the aim of suggestion that only the head feature of C of CP containing overt wh-specifiers is strong enough to attract the auxiliary into the question affix.