Aspects of the morphosyntactic typology of Hong Kong English

Gisborne, Nikolas

doi:10.1075/eww.30.2.03gis

Cited by 40 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…This difficulty in Chinese learners' acquisition of English finite and nonfinite verbs has been observed in previous studies (e.g., Chang, 2005;Fang, 2014;Gisborne, 2009;Yang & Huang, 2009); however, a number of questions remain. Studies on Chinese learner's acquisition of English MVCs have been limited to error descriptions (e.g., Chang, 2005;Yang & Huang, 2009), frequency of learners' usage (Fang, 2014), or testing certain theories, i.e., performance or competence deficit (Chang, 2005).…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 69%

“…Chang thus argued that although inflections of finite verbs were missing in their English in a considerable proportion of Chinese learners, they indeed had the syntactic knowledge of [+-F]. A similar conclusion was drawn by Gisborne (2009). Gisborne ( 2009) searched for Hong Kong EFL learners' usage of either finite or nonfinite complements after "guess","realize" and "suggest" in the International Corpus of English-Hong Kong (ICE-HK).…”

Section: Previous Studies On the Acquisition Of Finite And Nonfinite Distinctions In The L2mentioning

confidence: 77%

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Crosslinguistic influence on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English finite and nonfinite distinctions

Tang

2020

Cogent Education

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English and Chinese have typological differences in finiteness. English has morphological finite and nonfinite distinction, whereas Chinese has no morphological finiteness, and multiple verbs in a clause appear in the form of bare verbs with optional aspectual morphemes, such as the perfective morpheme "le". The current study explores whether and how the lack of morphological finite and nonfinite distinctions in Chinese influences Chinese EFL (English as Foreign Language) learners' acquisition of English finite and nonfinite distinctions. The analysis of Chinese learners' English corpus showed evidence of both morphological transfer of bare verbs and morphosyntactic transfer by over-inflecting nonfinite verbs in English writing. These results evidenced the crosslinguistic influence on Chinese EFL learners' acquisition of English finite and nonfinite distinctions. The crosslinguistic influence also had an interaction with L2 proficiency, that is, low proficiency learners tended to have both morphological and syntactic transfer whereas with the development of L2 proficiency, syntactic transfer was reduced dramatically while morphology remained to be a problem. It thus revealed Chinese learners' developmental route and implied their morphological insensitivity.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Section: Previous Studies On the Acquisition Of Finite And Nonfinite Distinctions In The L2mentioning

confidence: 77%

Crosslinguistic influence on Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English finite and nonfinite distinctions

Tang

2020

Cogent Education

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“…Alongside research on its phonology (e.g., Hung 2000, 2012; Lam 2017) and lexis (e.g., Hung 2012; Evans 2015), HKE has also been subject to syntactic investigations covering variable subject-verb agreement (e.g., “She like to go there” (Gisborne 2009:159; Calle-Martín & Romero-Barranco 2017)), tense marking (e.g., “[He] has just uh get get back [. .…”

Section: Theoretical Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 99%

Particle Placement in Hong Kong English: Independence from Great Britain as a Trigger of Structural Change?

Bernaisch,

Funke

2024

Journal of English Linguistics

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In the framework of postcolonial Englishes and their evolutions, Hong Kong English represents an extraordinary case in that the political independence of Hong Kong from the British in 1997 did not result—as in most other cases—in a self-governing political body, but a formal re-integration of Hong Kong into China. As the handover of Hong Kong also marks a drastic linguistic re-orientation, this short-term diachronic paper studies newspaper data from before and after the 1997 handover. With a view to the structural object of investigation, particle placement, the exploration of relevant predictors and their effects in Hong Kong English sheds light on whether and, if so, how the end of British colonial rule has left linguistic traces in particle-placement choices. Using a sample of 322 particle verbs extracted from the South China Morning Post Corpus (SCMPC) and employing random forests, the study reports that pre- and post-handover constructional choices of particle placement are largely compatible with one another. Said choices are mainly guided by principles related to cognition and eurhythmy that—at least in the period observed—appear unlikely to be affected fundamentally by language-external political change.

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