The Role of Innate Knowledge in First and Second Language Acquisition - by Hasanbey Ellidokuzoglu - Education - http://maxpages.com/thena/Wanna

VI. WANNA CONTRACTION

A typical langauge-specific innate constraint is found in the use of "wanna" contraction. Native speaker of English use "want to" and "wanna" interchangeably in following sentences.

1)
a. He wants to watch TV but I don't want to.
b. He wants to watch TV but I don't wanna.

2)
a. Who do they want to see?
b. Who do they wanna see?

A 'seemingly' natural conclusion that a child could arrive at, after being exposed to many of 'b' type sentences would be that 'wanna' contraction is optional in English, if he were to rely merely on general learning strategies. But native speakers of English do know that 'wanna' contraction is not always possible:

3)
a. Who do you want to feed the cat?
b.* Who do you wanna feed the cat?

Apparently external input does not give any cues as to why (3b) is ungrammatical, as in other superficially similar sentences the contraction is possible. The relevant cue comes from UG, which presupposes that a movement rule operates between two sentence structures, i.e. d-structure and s-structure (Cook, 1988, p. 93). Wh-questions are obtained by the movement of the wh-word from its original position in the underlying d-structure to its new position in the s-structure, leaving behind a coindexed trace in its former location. This trace is preserved in s-structure though it is phonologically null. So the s-structures of(2a) and (3a) are as follows:

4)
Who(i) do they want to see t(i)?

5)
Who(i) do you want t(i) to feed the cat?

Native speakers of English know that when a wh-trace intervenes between 'want' and 'to', the contraction is not possible. But neither the existence of this trace nor the operation of the movement rule is derivable from the surface structure of sentences, nor from the sematics as all of these sentences are meaningful with wanna. UG theorist believes that this is a typical manifestation of innately specified linguistic constraints.

A non-UG explanation might be that native speakers judge this type of sentences as ungrammatical simply because they never hear them. Such an explanation is not plausible as it presents a vicious cycle: why don't they hear such sentences at the first place. If there is no UG constraints working on these sentences, why don't native speakers of English produce such sentences? Secondly, absence of such sentences in input does not justify their ungrammaticality. That is one should not judge a unheard utterance as ungrammatical as the majority of sentences we are exposed to are heard for the first time in our lives. There are potentially infinite number of utterances which are perfectly grammatical. How do the native speakers differentiate these grammatically correct unheard utterances from their ungrammatical counterparts?

Again a non-UG response to such a question might be that on the basis of their repeated exposure to the pairs of sentences like 1a and 1b and hearing only 3a and not 3b, native speakers conclude that sentences like 3b are not possible (Haiman, 1997). One problem with such an explanation is that native speakers don't hear sentences in such identical pairs. Suppose that an English child heard a sentence like

6)
Never will he want to do the same thing again once he is punished.

It is quite likely that the child will never hear the WANNA counterpart of this sentence. If he is to follow the inductive repeated-exposure principle, then he need to formulate a rule for the absence of wanna in such a sentence whereas it is perfectly grammatical to use WANNA in this context. Such an inductive learning also requires quite a great amount of memory load (Gleitman and Gleitman, 1997).

Please, Click On The Parts Below To Read More:

7. Universal Grammar

8. Wanna and Turkish Learners of English

9. Conclusion

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