Acquisition of the constraints on wanna contraction by advanced second language learners : Universal Grammar and imperfect knowledge

Contraction of want to to wanna is subject to constraints which have been related to the operation of Universal Grammar. Contraction appears to be blocked when the trace of an extracted wh-word intervenes. Evidence for knowledge of these constraints by young English-speaking children in as been taken to show the operation of Universal Grammar in early child language acquisition. The present study investigates the knowledge these constraints in adults, both English native speakers and advanced Korean learners of English. The results of three experiments, using elicited production, oral repair, and grammaticality judgements, confirmed native speaker knowledge of the constraints. A second process of phonological elision may also operate to produce wanna. Learners also showed some differentiation of contexts, but much less clearly than native speakers. We speculate that non-natives may be using rules of complement selection, rather than the constraints of UG, to control contraction. Introduction: wanna contraction and language learnability In English, want to can be contracted to wanna, but not invariably. As first observed by Lakoff (1970) in examples such as (1), in which the object of the infinitival complement of want has been extracted by wh-movement, contraction is possible, but not in (2), in which the subject of the infinitival complement is extracted from the position between want and to. We shall call examples like (1) "subject extraction questions" (SEQ) and examples like (2) "object extraction questions" (OEQ).