Title: On the Topic Constructions in Chinese and their Transfer to L2 English Syntax
Abstract: This article discusses the transitional L2 English syntactic structures by the L1 Chinese high school students on the basis of Chinese‘topic features’,where there are few constraints on topicalization.In English,topic constructions are possible only when the topic is coreferential with an empty position in the same sentence.The Chinese topic features are transferred as the default case to English by the high school students,so that they continue to produce the Chinese-patterned topic structures in their English utterances.The author claims in the end that L2 syntactic development should be stimulated by awareness-raising and improved input which can give rise to internal UG-constrained change,an effect of conflict be- tween word order in the input and the word order determined by the current grammar.
Publication Year: 2006
Publication Date: 2006-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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