Preposition Stranding in the EFL Acquisition of Embedded Wh-questions

Abstract

This study investigates the acquisition of preposition stranding in the syntactic contexts, such as elliptical wh-questions and non-elliptical ones, by Korean speakers learning English. An acceptability judgment task was conducted to examine the effects of clause types (non-elliptical vs. elliptical), preposition placement (preposition stranding vs. preposition pied-piping), and the V-P dependency (Dependent vs. Independent vs. Irrelevant). The results showed that preposition stranding was rejected in elliptical wh-questions while preposition fronting was favored over preposition stranding in non-elliptical wh-questions. Though the results were seemingly contradictory to the saliency hypothesis proposed by Bardovi-Harlig (1987), the study will provide an Optimality-theoretic analysis for the learners’ interlanguage grammars by adopting the constraint ranking proposed by Choi (2008).