Studies on implicit learning have provided evidence for L2 acquisition of syntactic features, yet limited effort has been made to gauge the applicability of the implicit learning paradigm on syntactic structures that are posited by nativists as innate and need not to be learned. This thesis investigates the implicit learning of the Overt Pronoun Constraint(OPC), a claimed UG-derived constraint (White, 2003a,b; Hawkins, 2008)that prevents overt pronouns from taking quantified NPs as antecedents in null-argument languages(Montalbetti, 1983), and seeks alternative explanations to such knowledge from the usage-based perspective in SLA. In Experiment 1, participants’L1 prior knowledge of the binding constraint of the overt pronoun he in Mandarin Chinese and English was investigated respectively. Results show that Chinese participants accepted the bound variable interpretation of the pronoun他 (he) when the matrix subject (the subject of the main clause) was 有人someone, suggesting that the OPC may not be fully applicable in Chinese, and that the OPC may not be a universal phenomenon in all null-argument languages as claimed by nativists (e.g. Kanno, 1997). In terms of English participants, they rejected bound variable interpretations more often when the matrix subject of the sentence was a quantified NP than when it was a referring NP, indicating some biases of the interpretation towards the reference of the overt pronoun. Potential explanations for these cross-linguistic differences include the popularized use of singular they in English (Bhat, 2004) to refer to gender-ambiguous antecedents, and the degree of consistency in definiteness between the matrix subject and the pronoun as the sub-clause subject. In Experiment 2, Chinese L1 speakers were exposed to a semi-artificial language system that combined the binding constraint of the Japanese pronoun “kare” with Chinese to see whether they could acquire the OPC implicitly. The learning was measured by a timed Grammatical Judgment Test (GJT), and awareness was assessed by confidence ratings, source attributions and verbal reports. Results show that learning effect (both implicit and explicit) was observed in the Chinese group. In Experiment 3, Chinese participants were exposed to a semi-artificial language system that combined the overt pronoun binding constraint with their L2 English, and no learning effect was observed in this group, indicating that implicit learning could be affected by participants’L2 proficiency. In Experiment 4, the implicit learning of the pronoun constraint by English native speakers was investigated and L1 transfer effect was found in this experiment. To sum up, results show that the interpretation bias of the overt pronoun might be learned implicitly, although the learning process could be affected by participants’ prior linguistic knowledge. It also suggests that this bias might be learned without the assumption of UG existence, which show support for the usage-based approach in SLA. / published_or_final_version / English / Master / Master of Philosophy

This dissertation is a contrastive study of the semantics, pragmatics, and discourse functions of demonstratives in English and Chinese.It is shown that there is a metaphorical relationship between the basic semantic properties of demonstratives and their various uses in the two languages. The proximal demonstrative tends to be used for spatial, temporal, or emotional closeness, or for a foregrounded referent, whereas the distal demonstrative is usually used for spatial, temporal, or emotional remoteness, or for a backgrounded referent. However, details of the metaphorical extensions in the two languages may vary. Functional differences between demonstrative pronouns and neuter pronouns in English and Chinese are also discussed. It is shown that demonstrative pronouns tend to code a higher degree of topic discontinuity or topic change, and neuter pronouns a greater degree of topic continuity in the two languages.In addition to contributing to an understanding of the basic factors governing the uses of demonstratives in English and Chinese, which could be used as a basis for further cross linguistic study, this research should also have some pedagogical value for teaching both English and Chinese as foreign languages. / Department of English

LD2668 .T4 1941 W72 / Master of Science

In this thesis, I explored several neural network-based models to resolve the issues of zero pronoun in Chinese English translation tasks. I reviewed previous work that attempts to take the resolution as a classification task, such as determining if a candidate in a given set is the antecedent of a zero pronoun, which can be categorized as rule-based and supervised methods. Existing methods either did not take the relationship between potential zero pronoun candidates into consideration or did not fully utilize attention to zero pronoun representations. In my experiments, I investigated attention-based neural network models as well as its application in reinforcement learning environment building on an existing neural model. In particular, I integrated an LSTM-tree-based module into the attention network, which encodes syntax information for zero pronoun resolution tasks. In addition, I apply Bi-Attention layers between modules to interactively learn the syntax and semantic alignment. Furthermore, I leveraged a reinforcement learning framework to fine-tune the proposed model, and experiment with different encoding strategies, i.e., FastText, BERT, and trained RNN-based embedding. I found that attention-based model with LSTM-tree- based module, fine-tuned under reinforcement learning framework that utilized FastText embedding achieves the best performance, superior to the baseline models. I evaluated the model performance on different categories of resources, of which FastText shows great potential in encoding web blog text.

This study examines the translation of three forms of reader address from English to Swedish in a gardening guidebook – the pronoun you as a second person reference and generic reference, modal verbs, and imperatives. The translation was made by the author of this study. The aim of the study is to investigate how the three forms of reader address is translated. The quantitative analysis shows that the most used form of reader address out of the three investigated are imperatives, while the pronoun you followed closely behind. While modal verbs were used frequently in the ST, the modality was not translated in the TT. The qualitative analysis shows that the pronoun you was translated into second person du, third person generic man or was omitted in the translation in almost equal measure. How the pronoun you was translated in the TT depended on how the translator interpreted the author’s target audience. Only two modal verbs occurred frequently in the ST, and in the TT they were either translated as modal verbs or into present tense. Lastly, the imperative verbs were most commonly translated as imperatives in the TT. About 10% were translated into tensed verbs. Furthermore, half of that was translated to form suggestions.

Elicitation of basic clause structure

by Tang Siu-Lam. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-54). / Appendix in Chinese. / Acknowledgements --- p.I / Abstract --- p.II / Table of Contents --- p.III / Appendix --- p.IV / Introduction --- p.1 / Parsing Models --- p.3 / Possible Causes for the Discrepancies Observed in Past Studies --- p.7 / Language Specific Properties and Parsing --- p.13 / The Present Study --- p.15 / Experiment1 --- p.19 / Method --- p.22 / Results and Discussion --- p.25 / Experiment2 --- p.28 / Method --- p.30 / Results and Discussion --- p.30 / Experiment3 --- p.35 / Method --- p.38 / Results and Discussion --- p.38 / General Discussion --- p.45 / References --- p.43 / Appendix --- p.55 / "Instructions used in Experiments 1, 2, and3" --- p.55

by Chiu Sung Pui. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-100). / Abstract also in Chinese. / Chapter Chapter I --- Introduction --- p.6 / Chapter 1.1. --- An overview of Chomsky's Binding Theory --- p.7 / Chapter 1.2. --- Referential and Bound pronouns --- p.9 / Chapter 1.3. --- Definition of bound pronouns --- p.9 / Chapter Chapter II --- Literature on bound pronouns --- p.10 / Chapter 2.1. --- Higginbotham (1980) --- p.10 / Chapter 2.2. --- Reinhart (1983) --- p.17 / Chapter 2.3. --- Koopman & Sportiche (1982) --- p.20 / Chapter 2.4. --- lappin (1985) --- p.21 / Chapter 2.5. --- "aoun & hornstein (1991), aoun & li (1990)，aoun & li (1993)" --- p.23 / Chapter Chapter III --- Binding Facts in Chinese --- p.31 / Chapter 3.1. --- Patterns in which the antecedent c-commands the pronoun --- p.32 / Chapter 3.2. --- Patterns in which the antecedent does not c-command the pronoun --- p.53 / Chapter 3.3. --- Summary of the binding facts --- p.67 / Chapter Chapter IV --- A revisit of the proposals on Bound pronouns --- p.69 / Chapter 4.1. --- Review of Higginbotham (1980) --- p.69 / Chapter 4.2. --- Review of Reinhart (1983) --- p.70 / Chapter 4.3. --- Review of Koopman & Sportiche (1982) --- p.72 / Chapter 4.4. --- Review of Lappin (1985) --- p.73 / Chapter 4.5. --- "Review of Aoun & Hornstein (1991)，Aoun & Li (1990), Aoun & Li (1993)" --- p.74 / Chapter Chapter V --- Discussion & Conclusion --- p.78 / Chapter 5.1. --- Bound Pronoun Condition for Chinese --- p.78 / Chapter 5.2. --- Wh-phrases as A'-binders --- p.78 / Chapter 5.3. --- The Empty Reflexive Puzzle --- p.80 / Chapter 5.4. --- pro-drop & Montabeltii's Overt Pronoun Constraint --- p.81 / Chapter 5.5. --- Factors affecting pronominal binding --- p.82 / Chapter 5.5.1. --- Nature of Verbs --- p.82 / Chapter 5.5.2. --- Quantifier types and the size of the extension denoted by the QP --- p.90 / Chapter 5.5.3. --- Sentence types & the number feature of the quantified NPs --- p.94 / Conclusion --- p.98 / References --- p.99 / Appendix I --- p.101 / Appendix II --- p.102 / Appendix III --- p.105

published_or_final_version / Language Studies / Master / Master of Arts

M.A. (African Languages) / Please refer to full text to view abstract