Earticle

Hale and Keyser (2002) try to solve the mystery of the ban on depictive predication with an indirect object with recourse to the suggestion that a derived DP position is not relevant to depictive secondary predication. Their suggestion cannot be maintained because a derived DP can serve as the host of a depictive in the case of subject-oriented depictive predication, On the basis of this observation, this paper proposes a new configurational approach to depictive predication. The proposal is based on the following three basic assumptions. First, in English, object nominals raise overtly to the specifier of a functional structure, which is between vP and VP. Second, the attachment site of depictives is confined to v' and V' due to their semantic relevance to an event. Third, the subject of a depictive is determined by two configurational conditions: the c-command condition and the MDP. Under this theoretical framework, the ban on depictive predication with an indirect object is accounted for as the MDP violation. The counterexamples to the Hale and Keyser’s conjecture, from Koizumi (1994) and Arimoto (1991), are not problematic in our theoretical framework since we do not assume that a derived DP is inappropriate for depictive predication. Maling’s (2001) examples, in which a depictive can be predicated of an indirect object, do not constitute a challenge to our proposal since they can be analyzed as light verb constructions.

The ultimate goal of this paper is to provide an empirical analysis of the adult subjects’ acquisition of the c-command condition. A major point to note is that the L2 learners looked for similarities between Korean binding and English binding. The results from the adult subjects suggest that the L2 learners may not entertain Chomsky’s UG theory that learners have complete access to Universal Grammar. A further point to note is that the L2 learners have difficulty acquiring the c-command condition due to markedness. The results from the adult subject’ responses show that the markedness of L2 impedes L2 learning. With respect to the order of binding, the L2 learners acquired condition B before condition A. Finally, the key findings of our research are that the c-command condition which appears in the embedded sentence was first acquired by the L2 learners, followed by the c-command condition which occurs in the genitive NP, the c-command condition which appears in the conjunct sentence, the c-command condition which occurs in two separate sentences, the c-command condition which appears in the sentence involving wh-movement, and the c-command condition which occurs in topicalization, in that order.