Uneven reassembly of tense, telicity and discourse features in L2 acquisition of the Chineseshì … decleft construction by adult English speakers

Abstract

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese shì … de cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity ranking task were administered to learners with intermediate and advanced Chinese proficiency ( n = 76). The results reveal an initial mapping between the target Chinese structure and the English it-cleft construction. The relevant tense, telicity and discourse features are added in an uneven feature-by-feature manner in the subsequent feature reassembly. It is proposed that feature reassembly tasks involving cross-domain operations (e.g. from prosody to syntax) are more complicated and more difficult to accomplish than those taking place within the same linguistic domain.

Reassembly of plural and human features in the L2 acquisition of Chinese by adult Korean speakers

“…Since the parser does not come into play and direct negative evidence is presumably unavailable, indirect negative evidence might be implicated. The idea is that language learners make use of statistical distributions of the input and form inductive generalizations about grammar rules of a specific language (Mai and Yuan, 2016; Rankin and Unsworth, 2016; Rothman and Slabakova, 2017; Yang 2002, 2004; Yang and Montrul, 2017). Take the exclusion of * Dem N-men as an example, since Dem N-tul is the obligatory context of plural marking in L1 Korean, L2 learners would expect to hear Dem N-men in the L2 input.…”

“…Several experimental studies have previously been conducted in the framework of the FRH. For example, Spinner (2013) examines the acquisition of number and gender in Swahili by English speakers, Cho and Slabakova (2014, 2015) explore the acquisition of definiteness and specificity in Russian by English and Korean speakers, Mai and Yuan (2016) look into the acquisition of the Chinese shi … de cleft construction by English speakers. As far as plurality is concerned, Hwang and Lardiere (2013) investigate the acquisition of the Korean -tul by English speakers, and Lee and Lardiere (2017) conduct a bidirectional acquisition study of plural marking in Korean and Indonesian.…”

L2 Chinese: Grammatical development and processing

“…Hence, Chinese offers exceptionally rich materials for studies venturing into the acquisition of new combinations of features and conditions in new functional categories, or more specifically how learners register those new feature sets and de-register L1-based feature sets in response to input in the course of L2 development, which is an emerging research theme in the field (Dekydtspotter and Renaud, 2014; Lardiere, 2009). While parallel syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and prosodic computations are generally necessary in parsing the input, a body of research has begun to show that L2 Chinese learners, like those of other L2s, do not master every detail about a structure at the same time (Mai, 2012; Yuan, 2010, 2013), possibly because they develop the ability to parse different aspects of a structure rather unevenly (Mai and Yuan, in press). Studying which features/aspects of a linguistic structure become processable or accessible for which type of L2 Chinese learner at which acquisition stage is undoubtedly an extremely promising topic for future research on L2 Chinese processing and on L2 sentence processing in general.…”

Grammatical meaning and the second language classroom: Introduction

“…Investigation of the relationships between syntax, semantics, and discourse has long been an important focus of formal linguistic research (e.g., Chierchia, 1998Chierchia, , 2009Jackendoff, 1992;Krifka et al, 1995;Kuroda, 1988). More recently, research into L2 acquisition from a generative linguistic perspective (see below) has turned its attention to some of the grammar-meaning interface phenomena explored in formal linguistics, in order to address questions about L2 acquisition theory (Belletti, Bennati & Sorace 2007;Mai & Yuan, 2016;Marsden, 2008Marsden, , 2009Slabakova, 2003;Slabakova & García Mayo, 2015;Sorace & Serratrice, 2009; among many others). The output of this body of research includes findings that could have implications for the language classroom.…”