
L2 Chinese Linguistics Seminar
Research on L2A has extended from a level of principals and parameters to one of features associated with lexical and functional categories (Lardiere, 2009, among others). With a feature-based approach, our empirical study examines how L1 English L2 Mandarin speakers reassemble the [+definite] features in their L2 Mandarin grammars. In Mandarin, an article-less language, the [±definite] features are represented through a more complicated system (than in English) with the support of bare nouns ([±definite]), numerals ([±definite]), classifiers ([-definite]), or demonstratives([+definite]). In order to examine how L1 English L2 Mandarin speakers express different types of definiteness in real time, we conduct a picture-elicited production task with 57 L1 English L2 Mandarin speakers divided into three proficiency groups (17 beginner, 21 intermediate, and 19 advanced) and 22 native Mandarin speakers as a control group. Both tasks contain 16 critical sentences in four conditions of definiteness (i.e. four tokens in each condition), which are anaphoric definiteness in subject/object positions and associational definiteness in subject/object positions.
Contact |
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Professor Boping Yuan: by10001@cam.ac.uk |