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.

In minimalist theory of syntax, it is a standard assumption that movement is triggered by feature checking between the attractor (or checker) and the attracted (or moved/checked). Under this assumption, however, the motivation for the intermediate steps in interclausal movements, especially in the so-called "long" wh-movement, does not seem to be very clear. In order to account for the successive cyclicity of wh-movement, Chomsky (2000, 2001a, b) and others assume that the head of every phase-inducing category has some uninterpretable feature, which triggers successive cyclic movement. On the other hand, Boskovie (2002) and others propose that successive cyclicity has no direct relation with feature checking, but that the requirement for intermediate steps in interclausal movement is due to some Subjacency-like locality condition, e.g., the Minimal Chain Condition of Chomsky and Lasnik (1993). Neither of these two approaches, however, is successful in accounting for the successive cyclicity of wh-movement. The feature-based approach of Chomsky (2000, 2001a, b) and others assumes some unmotivated feature, e.g., [uwh]; the constraint-based approach of Bodkovid (2002) and others must assume "look-ahead," which is to be avoided by the phase-by-phase model of the minimalist framework. We suggest two possible directions to pursue: one with top-down structure-building, and the other with Greed-like properties of the extracted element itself, laying more emphasis on the latter approach.

Youngjun Jang. 2001. Complementizers and Complementation in English and Korean: Successive Cyclic WH-Movement. Studies in Modern Grammar 25, 1-28. This paper investigates complementizers and complementation in English and Korean. I argue that a sentence is ultimately a projection of C because the clausal types must be present for interpretation and that the clausal typing feature in C must be checked off. It is shown that the superficial difference between English-type languages and Korean-type languages with regard to wh-movement is due to different modes of checking off the clausal typing feature in C. Some theoretical consequences of this proposal are that successive cyclic wh-movement can be naturally accounted for in a derivational approach to syntax and that the strength of C is always strong both in English and Korean-type languages.