Chinese allows object drop in contexts where there is an antecedent (anaphoric contexts), where English generally requires an overt object pronoun (e.g. Mary’s bike is broken. I am going to repair *(it) for her). In non-anaphoric contexts, however, English allows a null cognate object e as in Mary reads [e] every night whereas Chinese requires an overt cognate object (kan-shu, literally ‘read-book’). Previous SLA studies indicate Chinese learners of L2 English have problems unlearning anaphoric object drop in English, generally ascribed to effects of L1 transfer. This study brings a novel perspective to the L2 learnability problem by incorporating Cheng and Sybesma’s (1998) proposed negative correlation between the two rules: that allowing object drop in anaphoric contexts is incompatible with allowing object drop in non-anaphoric contexts.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:635018 |
| Date | January 2014 |
| Creators | Lee, Chi Wai |
| Publisher | University of Newcastle upon Tyne |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://hdl.handle.net/10443/2488 |
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