Children's learning of language-universal and language-specific principles of argument representation was the topic under investigation in the three studies comprising this thesis. Another objective was to investigate whether a discourse-pragmatic approach could be employed to explain children's patterns of argument omission and production, developmentally and crosslinguistically. To answer these questions, referential choice in the spontaneous language of monolingual English-speaking and monolingual Japanese-speaking children and their mothers was developmentally investigated whereby a sentence argument's morphological form (null, pronominal, lexical), referential status (given, new), and syntactic location (transitive subject, transitive object, intransitive subject) were systematically analysed. The first and second studies revealed that neither the English-speaking nor the Japanese-speaking children showed sensitivity to the referential distinction between given and new information early on in development (at 21 months of age). The English-speaking children mastered English-specific referential conventions between MLU 2.00 and 3.99 (between 24 and 32 months) and employed non-linguistic pragmatic correlates to supplement unconventional argument use from as early as MLU 1.00 (between 21 and 23 months). By contrast, the Japanese-speaking children showed unconventional referential choices as late as MLU 4.00 (between 33 and 36 months), as well as inconsistent use of non-linguistic pragmatic correlates. The third study revealed that, although language-specific differences were observed, neither group of children violated any of the four Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) constraints: The children avoided using more than one new or lexical argument per transitive clause and avoided casting new or lexical arguments as transitive subjects. However, evidence of sensitivity to PAS strategies from early on in development was inconclusive because the children omitted most sentence arguments at the beginning of speech production. Finally, all three studies revealed that children's referential choices that were inconsistent with expected discourse-pragmatic principles reflected similar patterns observed in parental input. Altogether, this set of studies led to the following general conclusions regarding the learning of argument representation and distribution in syntax: (1) a discourse-pragmatic approach can explain language-universal features of argument omission and production in child language and (2) language-specific strategies are learned via parental input.

Within a theoretical framework that combines generative X-bar syntax (Chomsky 1986), a compositional interpretive semantics and elements of Aristotelian logic, this thesis studies the nature of the syntactic and semantic constituents involved in the subject-predicate relations of elementary sentences containing 'be'. Interpretation is characterized in terms of the entities of various types that speakers intend to refer to and the various ontological types that the referents are said to belong to. 'Be' is analyzed as a single lexical item. This analysis unifies all syntactic functions (e.g., auxiliary, copula, main verb) and all "senses" of 'be' (e.g., definitional, equative, predicative, etc.). Conceptually, 'be' in English is an explicit sign of attribution. The propositional content of simple sentences of the form (NP be XP) is the attribution of a certain ontological type or types to the referent(s) of the subject NP. Although the value of postulating a single ontological category to account for all the entities that speakers can refer to and talk about (such as an Aristotelian substance) is questionable, nevertheless, such categories and types seem pertinent for linguistic analysis. With respect to linguistic inference, pronominalization, and question words, an analysis based on ontological types is shown to be more explanatory than one based on the assignment of a fixed set of thematic relations to arguments.

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by Gu Gang. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-142). / Abstract also in Chinese. / ABSTRACT --- p.v / Chapter CHAPTER 1 --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Chapter CHAPTER 2 --- THE THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK --- p.7 / Chapter 2.1 --- Grammaticality and Acceptability --- p.7 / Chapter 2.2 --- The X-bar Theory --- p.9 / Chapter 2.3 --- C-command --- p.10 / Chapter 2.4 --- Barrier --- p.11 / Chapter 2.5 --- Government --- p.12 / Chapter 2.6 --- The Binding Theory --- p.13 / Chapter 2.7 --- Indexation --- p.16 / Chapter 2.7.1 --- Lexical Words --- p.17 / Chapter 2.7.2 --- Trace --- p.19 / Chapter 2.7.2.1 --- The ECP --- p.21 / Chapter 2.7.2.2 --- The Overt Trace --- p.23 / Chapter 2.7.3 --- PRO --- p.25 / Chapter 2.7.4 --- pro --- p.28 / Chapter 2.7.5 --- Summary --- p.29 / Chapter 2.8 --- The General Control --- p.30 / Chapter 2.9 --- Summary --- p.33 / Chapter CHAPTER 3 --- THE CLASSIFICATION OF TOPIC STRUCTURES --- p.35 / Chapter 3.1 --- The Definition --- p.35 / Chapter 3.2 --- Topicalized Topics and Left-Dislocalized Topics --- p.40 / Chapter 3.3 --- Pure Topics and Contrastive Topics --- p.42 / Chapter 3.4 --- The Topic PP --- p.47 / Chapter 3.5 --- Covert Passive Structures --- p.50 / Chapter 3.6 --- Summary --- p.54 / Chapter CHAPTER 4 --- SOME APPROACHES ON THE GENERATION OF THE TOPIC STRUCTURE --- p.56 / Chapter 4.1 --- Ross (1967) --- p.56 / Chapter 4.2 --- Chomsky (1977) --- p.59 / Chapter 4.3 --- Brunson (1992) --- p.60 / Chapter 4.4 --- "Huang (1984, 1987，1989, 1991)" --- p.61 / Chapter 4.5 --- "Xu (1985,1986, 1994)" --- p.64 / Chapter 4.6 --- Summary --- p.65 / Chapter CHAPTER 5 --- The BASE-GENERATION APPROACH --- p.67 / Chapter 5.1 --- The Identification of the Gap in the Comment --- p.67 / Chapter 5.2 --- Subjacency Effect or Control Failure? --- p.70 / Chapter 5.3 --- Free Empty Categories --- p.76 / Chapter 5.4 --- The Base-Generated Variable --- p.82 / Chapter 5.5 --- Summary --- p.84 / Chapter CHAPTER 6 --- THE TOPIC PP --- p.85 / Chapter 6.1 --- Disconstituents --- p.85 / Chapter 6.2 --- The Order Among PPs --- p.87 / Chapter 6.2.1 --- English --- p.87 / Chapter 6.2.2 --- Chinese --- p.88 / Chapter 6.2.2.1 --- Temporal Adjuncts --- p.88 / Chapter 6.2.2.2 --- Locative Adjuncts --- p.94 / Chapter 6.2.2.3 --- Relative Position of the Parallel Adjuncts --- p.96 / Chapter 6.3 --- Topic PPs and Disconstituents --- p.98 / Chapter 6.3.1 --- Topic PPs and V-bar Disconstituents --- p.98 / Chapter 6.3.2 --- Topic PPs and Subject --- p.102 / Chapter 6.3.3 --- AS for Topics and Disconstituents --- p.105 / Chapter 6.4 --- Summary --- p.107 / Chapter CHAPTER 7 --- THE RESUMPTIVE PRONOUN IN THE COMMENT --- p.109 / Chapter 7.1 --- A Controversy --- p.109 / Chapter 7.2 --- Traces and Resumptive Pronouns --- p.111 / Chapter 7.3 --- The Binding Constraint --- p.115 / Chapter 7.4 --- The Complex NP --- p.117 / Chapter 7.5 --- Why Overt? --- p.119 / Chapter 7.6 --- Summary --- p.129 / Chapter CHAPTER 8 --- CONCLUSIONS --- p.130 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.135

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The research began with the study of teachers' written comments on pupils' written work in an English teaching context. There were several reasons for the selection of the written comment as the subject of an investigation: first, the comment communicates the teacher's response to the pupil's work, and as such it offers a potential source of information to the pupil of relevance to his learning. In addition, written comments, as a form of individualised teaching on an informal day-to-day basis, seem likely to represent a significant portion of the total feedback received by any one pupil in relation to his individual performance. Third, to date, teachers' comments have not figured to any real extent as an area of research. Where they have, they have tended to be part of a wider study which did not involve the conceptualisation of comments as providing instructive information of value to the learner. For all of these reasons, an investigation of the character and possible contribution of the written comment to pupil learning seemed a potentially worthwhile area for research. Hence, the written comment is the focus of the first part of this study. Though the work began with the written comment, in time the questions emerging from the initial investigation suggested the value of extending the field to include a detailed study of the relationship between the classroom context and the written comment; and, more significantly as it turned out, of the oral comment as instructive feedback to the learner. Oral comments, therefore, are the subject of the second part. In the third section, the main questions arising from the oral comment data are examined. This meant in fact consideration of some teachers' images of the aspect of their teaching which most features the oral comment. In summary, the three parts of the study are: 1) an investigation of written comments; 2) an investigation of oral comments; 3) a report of teachers' accounts of one major aspect of their teaching.

This thesis investigates the syntax-discourse interface in adult, end state second language (L2) acquisition. Specifically, it examines topic constructions in Spanish and English, namely Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) and Contrastive Left Dislocation (CLD), which exhibit both syntactic and discourse level properties. In both cases, topics occur at the left periphery of clauses and reintroduce a subset of a known set previously mentioned in discourse. Sensitivity to specificity is available in Spanish but not in English. The interpretation of the topicalized element as either generic or specific depends on the presence or absence of the clitic. Data from a bidirectional study are reported in order to investigate the issue of L1 transfer as well as the question of whether acquiring a new property is easier than losing a property. / Three current theories of acquisition are examined, namely, the Full Transfer/Full Access model (FT/FA), Failed Functional Features Hypothesis/Representational Deficit Hypothesis (FFFH/RDH), and Optionality theory. The theories are considered with respect to their predictions about L2 ultimate attainment and the syntax-discourse interface. / Participants were 15 end state speakers of L2 Spanish/L1 English and 15 end state speakers of L2 English/L1 Spanish were tested. Three tasks were administered for each study (Sentence Completion Task, oral Sentence Selection Task, and oral Acceptability Task) targeting topic constructions and associated interpretive properties in the respective target languages. Results for the L2 Spanish study indicate that while the syntactic properties of CLLD were acquired, the interpretive properties of specificity were fossilized (i.e. clitic was overgeneralized). Results for the L2 English study also showed that the syntactic properties were acquired but the specificity distinction of the L1 was transferred into the L2. Results demonstrate that problems with specificity occur in both directions as predicted by the theory of Optionality. In both cases, the optionality found at the interpretive level was L1-based. Namely, non-target L1 forms co-existed with the L2 forms.