i~
3c ~ §
'f IE] ,+ ~ 1B 1z f ~j~l!L t ~
8'1 ~ 1% 1& /~ m1L-.:....:::t=---_
~*41t ~~t I~
*~ 1 B..klfJ ~%1-
An
§JU
2
~~
~~~-9ffl 1L~, 1ft M~4t
~
0 D
7 iJ?
A STUDY ON NULL SUBJECTS IN CHINESE SPEAKERS'
ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH
by
Zhang Jing
A Thesis
Submitted to the Graduate School and College of English
in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for
the Degree of Master of Arts
Under the Supervision of Professor Hua Dongfan
Shanghai International Studies University
December 2006
Fr
sA
*~~~~~Ra~~~m~~~~~M~~*oa*~~~~
~,~T~~~tt~~W~W~*,~~~~~AB~~~d0~tt
~~~~*,m~~~R~~~ffM~~m~~~u~~mw~ffltt
~M~o~ft-~I~~~$~*~~~~~W~~~~B~~~~
11= T aJ:J 1ijij s<J a]3 i5l
0
~~i~}(11=~%:i;:
%:i; a,Jj: u-ot ~
ft. ~
/2
Jj
I!>
B
~~i~)(1tffl~ttFrSA
1:. jfij;ljl- 00 i! *~~ttf*ff~~i~~ ~ ~ T ~ ~M }(t~,
~1:.~ 0H*~{tr~)(s<Ji£:!'$EJGW~r*J~,
PI ~ 1~ I~
1=iJt;J rtJif JCwrJEJGmt1JJZi
~*~~~~ff,mOO~l:.~0~*~{tr~~~~$~$~~~o~
~~W~~,
~~W~~*~~~~~~eo
Acknowledgement
First and foremost, I am greatly indebted to my supervisor Hua Dongfan who has led
me into the beautiful field of second language acquisition research. As supervisor, he had
an effective way of coaching me along the road to the completion of my thesis. Had it not
been for his constant guidance and weekly discussions, and his useful suggestions and
encouragement, I would not have finished this thesis.
I would also very much like to thank all the professors whose lectures gave me a
basis in linguistics. My heartfelt thanks go to: Professor Mei Deming, Professor He
Zhaoxiong, Professor Xu Yulong, Professor Shu Dingfang, Professor Li Ji'an and
Professor Zou Shen.
I would also thank many schoolfellows and friends for their suggestions given to my
thesis and for sharing the experience of writing a thesis. My friends Tian yinghua, Li
Duanyang, Gong Weizhong, Zeng Li, Jiang Yuewei who lent me many reference materials
and offered very helpful advice on thesis writing and on my test designing.
Furthermore, I am very grateful to those who participated in my Grammaticality
Judgment Task to fill in my questionnaire. They are: students from The Middle School in
Balicha Rural Township, Henan Province; students from The Second High Middle School
in Xi County, Henan Province; students from College of Foreign Languages, China
University of Geosciences, in Wuhan City, Hubei Province. I am also no less grateful to all
the friends who helped me to find the Chinese subjects and the native English speakers and
to carry out the work of questionnaire. They are: Gao Yongxiang, Yang hongyan, Fan Juan,
and Professor Ken Turner who works in University of Brighton, England.
I also want to thank my parents and my younger sister. With their consistent support
and understanding I could live through these two and a half years and finally complete my
thesis.
Last but not least, I will give my special and heartfelt thanks to my husband. I want
to thank him for all the help he gives me, for taking such good care of me and for being
there.
· 1.
Abstract
This thesis examines the unlearning of null subjects in Chinese speakers' acquisition
of L2 English. Chinese is a null-subject language but English is not, although sometimes
colloquial English allows null subjects.
Based on the analysis of Null Subject Parameter and of subjects in Chinese and
English, this study probes an investigation into Chinese-speaking English Learners'
acquisition of non-null subjects in English from four aspects: the referential pronoun
subjects, the expletive "it" subjects, the expletive weather "it" subjects, and the expletive
"there" subjects. Judgments by 18 junior high school students, 36 senior high school
students, 20 university English major students, plus 6 native speakers of English, were
obtained. The test was conducted with the method of grammaticality judgment task.
The test results show that Ll transfer does affect L2learners' acquisition of non-null
subjects in English. The performance of L2 learners improves as their English proficiency
grows. The data suggests that UG remains functioning in SLA.
Keywords: SLA; UG; null subjects; Null Subject Parameter
-2-
论文摘要
本文通过试验对中国学习者关于英语空主语的习得情况进行了研究。汉语句子中
有些主语可以省略，但是英语中每个句子都要求有主语存在，虽然英语口语中有时会
出现主语省略的情况。
基于对空主语参数以及英语和汉语主语情况的分析，本文从指示代词(
referential
pronoun) 主语 、 虚词("it" )主语、天气虚词(
weather"it" )主语，存现结构虚词( "there")
主语四个方面测试了中国英语学习者对英语中主语不能省略的掌握情况。试验数据包
含 1 8位初中学生， 36 位 高 中 生 ， 20 位大 学英语专业 的 学 生 ， 以 及6 位 以 英语为 母语
的人。测试采取语法判断法 ( the
grammaticality judgment task)
来进行 。
测试数据表明，母语迁移影响了二语习得者对英语空主语的习得，初学者的习得
情况较差，但随着英语熟练程度的提高，习得情况逐渐得到改善，普遍语法在二语习
得中仍起作用。
关键词:二语习得:普遍语法:空主语:空主语参数
- 3-
Contents
Abstract
1
itx~~
2
Contents
3
Chapter 1. Introduction
5
1.1 Universal Grammar and Language Acquisition
5
1.2 UG and L1 Acquisition
6
1.2.1 Parameter Setting
7
1.3 UG and Second Language Acquisition
8
1.3.1 Parameter Resetting
8
1.3.2 Poverty-of-the-Stimulus: Learnability Problem
9
Chapter 2. The Studies of the Null Subject Parameter
11
2.1 Null-subject Phenomena
11
2.2 The Null Subject Parameter
14
2.3 Null Subject Parameter and Chinese
14
2.3.1 The Morphological Uniformity Principle
14
2.3.2 Yuan's Proposal
16
Chapter 3 Literature Review of L2A Studies on Null Subjects
23
3.1 Introduction
23
3.2 Studies of Null Subjects in L1 Acquisition
23
3.3 Studies of Null Subjects in L2 Acquisition
24
3.4 The Triggers in Acquisition of Null Subject
29
Chapter 4. Experiment
34
4.1 Introduction
34
4.2 Predictions
35
4.3 Subjects
36
4.4 Test Design
38
4.4.1 The Grammaticality Judgment Task
.38
-4-
4.4.2 Procedure
39
Chapter 5. Results and Discussions
40
5.1 Experimental Results
40
5.1.1 Results of Tests of the Null Referential Pronoun Subjects
.40
5.1.2 Results of Tests of the Null Expletive "it" Subjects
.42
5.1.3 Results of Tests of the Null Expletive Weather "it" Subjects
.43
5.1.4 Results of Tests of the Null Expletive "there" Subjects
.45
5.2 Discussions
46
5.2.1 Discussion of the Null Referential Pronoun Subjects
.47
5.2.2 Discussion of the Null Expletive Subjects
.47
5.2.3 Discussion of the Predictions
.49
5.3 Conclusion
51
Appendix I
52
Appendix II
54
Appendix ill
56
Bibliography
59
-5-
Chapter 1. Introduction
1.1 Universal Grammar and Language Acquisition
The central concept of Universal Grammar (UG) is " the system of principles,
conditions, and rules that are elements or properties of all human languages ... the essence
of human language" (Chomsky 1976, p.29), which means that all human beings share part
of their knowledge of language; UG is their common possession despite which language
they speak.
The Principle and Parameters Theory is an important part of
ua
It claims that
language knowledge consists of principles universal to all languages and parameters that
vary from one language to another. UG theory holds that all speakers know a set of
principles that apply to all languages, and parameters that make one language differ from
another. UG allows for variation between languages through parameters. The parameter
itself is universal but the values a parameter may take vary from one language to another.
The parameters must be set through experience with the linguistic environment.
Principles are an important part of UG inside the mind, and they are not acquired
from the outside input, but attached to the person's knowledge of a particular language
together with values for parameters. However, even if you have the parameter present in
your mind, you still need to decide which setting is right for it. The parameter must be
'triggered' by something in the language input. Language is 'learnt', but parameter is
'triggered' .
Acquiring language means learning how these principles apply to a particular
language and which value is appropriate for each parameter. A child learning a particular
language is not directly provided with an established set of rules that can form a grammar,
but instead fixes syntactic parameters according to the available language input data.
Therefore, the principles and parameters that constitute knowledge of language must be
related to language acquisition.
- 6-
1.2 UG and Ll Acquisition
UG is proposed as part of an innate biologically endowed language faculty, which
permits the L1 learners to arrive at a grammar on the basis of linguistic experience
(exposure to input). Universal Grammar determines in advance what grammars can or
cannot be like.
When a child was born, his grammar is the initial state also called "zero state (So)",
and UG constitutes the initial state. The primary linguistic data are critical in helping the
child to determine the correct form of the grammar. Over some time, the grammar may be
restructured as the child receives a large amount of input and thus comes to a steady state
grammar (Ss) for the native language.
But this doesn't mean the child has the principles and parameters at birth. UG
principles and parameters are innate, some linguistic knowledge, however, emerges only at
a certain stage of development. With enough input, the child can gradually decide the
precise principles and parameters in his first language. At the same time the child arrives at
a steady state grammar (Ss) for the mother tongue and he can understand and produce
.language. Therefore we can say that this acquisition process is actually a parameter-setting
process.
Some arguments for L1 acquisition are well-known (Chomsky1981b, 1986b; Pinker
1994): the language capacity is. specific; ability to acquire language is independent of
intelligence; the pattern of acquisition is relatively uniform across different children,
different languages and different cultures; language is acquired with relative ease and
rapidly and without the benefit of instruction; children show creativity which goes beyond
the input that they are exposed to. All of these observations lead to an innate component to
language acquisition.
In some degree, Universal Grammar is motivated by the leamability argument which
is often referred to as the "logical problem of language acquisition" or the "poverty of the
stimulus problem": there is a mismatch between the input (the utterances that the child is
exposed to) and the output (the unconscious grammatical knowledge that the child
acquires). We know that the knowledge of language is so complex, subtle and abstract, but
the available input to the learners is so limited.
-7 -
Two factors constitute the child's linguistic experience: positive evidence and
negative evidence. Positive evidence is the primary linguistic data and it includes
utterances that to some extent indicate properties of the underlying grammar. The negative
evidence is the input data about ungrammaticality and it is not available during the
acquisition of the first language. Nevertheless, children gradually know that certain
utterances are not allowed and even know that certain structures are only permitted when
appearing in certain contexts. This kind of knowledge is acquired without any explicit or
implicit external stimuli about ungrammaticality. If such grammatical knowledge has not
come about from the available input, then it might be a consequence of some inherent
property in the child's mind. As explained by Pinker (1990), "if children do not get or do
not use negative evidence, their brain must contain some mechanism that either avoids
generating too large a language or can recover from such overgeneralization" (p.216.)
1.2.1 Parameter Setting
Parameter setting is another important part to an entire understanding of Ua. We
know that the parameters must be fixed after a child receives the input data. So the
language environment is very important for the child to assign values to various parameters
of LlG, Chomsky uses an image of switches which must be set by the language learner in
order to establish the network that determines the values of parameters left unspecified by
Ua. "The transition from the initial state So, to the steady state Ss, is a matter of setting the
switches" (Chomsky, 1986a, p.146).
Let's take the Null Subject (or the pro-drop) Parameter! as an example to see how
parameter setting works in first language acquisition. This parameter specifies which
language allows the deletion of pronominals in the subject position. English is not a null
subject language: in English, subjects are necessary in all clauses; this can be compared
with Chinese, a language that allows null subjects. The child learning Chinese would
discover that Chinese is a null-subject language according to the evidence he receives and
this enables him to set the Null Subject Parameter on, and this child begins to use null
1 The Null Subject Parameter is also known as the Pro-drop Parameter because the empty element in
the subject position is often referred to as pro.
- 8-
subject in his native language, as opposed to a child learning English.
1.3 UG and Second Language Acquisition
Second language acquisition differs in various ways from the first language
acquisition. L1 children start with the zero state (So) and go on to the steady state (Ss); L2
learners, however, already know a first language; they start with the initial state (Si)' The
initial state of the child's mind, So, has no language-specific knowledge; the initial state of
the L2 leamer, which we can distinguish by calling it S, already contains one grammar,
complete with principles and actual parameter settings. With different starting points in
first and second language acquisition, it is not surprising that the result is different. In L1
acquisition the final Ss is adult competence of whatever a native speaker knows. But the
final state in L2 acquisition is hard to define. Chomsky himself argues for the
'common-sense' view that only the complete knowledge of language counts, rather than
the intermediate states.
The question of whether L2 learners have access to UG has been perhaps the main
topic of research among those interested in applying principles and parameters theory to
second language acquisition. Or we can see from this point of view that Lz learners have
the same task as L1 learners that they also need to understand and speak the second
language after receiving the L2 input. The question of whether UG plays a role in L2
acquisition has also long been investigated by many linguists.
The earliest research on UG in L2 acquisition mainly focused on the issue that
whether or not UG remains available in acquisition. White (1989) lists five positions on the
logical possibilities for a role of UG in second language acquisition: Full access, No access,
Direct access, Indirect access, and Partial access. Among these hypotheses, most
researchers agreed that UG is not totally inaccessible, that L2 learners do have some
language behavior that must have originated in UG. But L2 learners clearly do attain
complex and subtle knowledge that does not derive just from the Ll.
1.3.1 Parameter Resetting
- 9-
Let us see how null-subject is acquired in a second language. L2 learners have had
one setting for null-subject of the L1, he might start from scratch like L1 learners or they
might transfer the parameter setting from their L1, which might or might not be the same
as the L2. If the two languages have the same setting, null-subject or non-null-subject, it is
hard to explore how the L2 acquisition happens from this similarity. Only when L2 settings
differ from L1 setting, we can see how the L2 acquisition takes place. Therefore if a
Chinese learner of English (null-subject -
non-null-subject) deletes subjects in English,
we could either say that he is transferring the L1 null-subject setting or that he is starting
from the unmarked null-subject setting. In reverse, if an English learner of Chinese showed
a lack of subjects in Chinese, this could not be transferred but might be the use of the
unmarked setting.
In the 1980s, many L2 researches into null-subject were conducted to see whether
the L1 setting influenced the L2. White(1986) compared French learners of English
(non-null-subject
-r
non-null-subject) with Spanish learners of English (null-subject-
non-null-subject). She found that "L1 parameters influence the adult leamer's view of the
L2 data, at least for a while, leading to transfer errors" (White, 1986, p.69). The MUG test
(Cook, 1994) shows similar results for the Japanese learners of Bnglislunull-subject-r
non-null-subject).
However, different to White, Liceras (1989) tested French- and English-speaking
learners of Spanish (non-null-subject-null-subject). Her conclusions were that "resetting
the pro-drop (null-subject) parameter from English and French to Spanish is not difficult
with respect to null subjects" (Liceras, 1989, p.126). So L2 learners start neither from the
L1 setting nor from the unmarked L1 setting.
1.3.2 Poverty-of-the-Stimulus: Learnability Problem
In L2 acquisition, learners have a similar task to that of L1 learners, that is, the need
to arrive at a system accounting for L2 input. We know the Poverty-of-the-Stimulus
argument is the key to establishing the existence of Ua, and thus it should continue to exist
in L2 acquisition. In L2 acquisition, there are abstract, complex and subtle properties of
-10 -
grammar that are underdetermined by the L2 input (White1989). If the L2learner acquires
abstract properties of grammar that could not have been learnt from the evidence available
to him, its only other source must be the innate properties of the human mind, similar to
the situation in Ll acquisition.
Schwartz and Sprouse(1998) illustrated three types of the stimulus effects in L2
acquisition that are importantly derivable neither from the Ll grammar nor only from the
input alone but which are definitely the result of UG Schwartz and Sprouse argued that
UG-compatible analyses of interlanguage data may be necessary, but they demonstrated
that the source of poverty of the stimulus effects in L2 can only be UG and that L2
acquisition is indeed UG-constrained.
In the rest of the paper, I will first provide an introduction to the null-subject
parameter and also explain why Chinese allows null subjects but English does not. I will
then look at the previous studies of null subjects in Ll and L2 acquisition research
respectively. Next, I will give a description of the experiment and present the experiment
results, and will then analyze and discuss the results obtained from the experiment. Finally,
I will draw conclusions on the basis of the analysis and discussion.
- 11 -
Chapter 2. The studies of the Null Subject Parameter
2.1 Null-subject Phenomena
It is said that the majority of the people in the world are native speakers of languages
that allow null subjects. There are a huge number of those who speak Chinese, Japanese,
Portuguese, Spanish or other null-subject languages as their native language. Take Spanish
and Chinese for instance, they both allow phonologically unrealized subjects, although
they are quite different in their respective systems of verbal inflection.
Linguistic data from many languages prove that null-subject phenomena are very
complex. Recently particular research has been given to the issue of inflectional
morphology of null-subject languages. Some null-subject languages such as Spanish,
Italian, and Portuguese have rich verbal inflection; while other null-subject languages such
as Chinese, Japanese'', and Korean have no verbal inflection. One parameter related to this
language phenomenon is the Null Subject Parameter, also called "pro-drop Parameter".
The Null Subject Parameter or pro-drop Parameter is one of the first parameters to
be proposed in generative linguistic theory. After it was introduced, many linguists began
to study the missing subjects. Italian is one of the first null-subject languages to be
extensively studied. Cook and Newson (1996, p.55) gave a line from a well-known Beatles
song:
(1)
I am the walrus.
In Italian this could be translated as a null-subject sentence:
(2)
Son oil tricheco.
am the walrus
2
Japanese verbs are inflected only for tense, aspect, and negation, but not for number and person.
- 12-
But the corresponding English equivalent is ungrammatical and thus unacceptable:
(3)
*3Am the walrus.
Spanish also allows null subjects:
(4)
anda muy ocupada.
is very busy.
"She is very busy."
It is well known that Chinese does not have subject-verb agreement. However, null
subjects occur rather freely in Chinese, which can be seen in the following examples:
(5)
Wo mai-le
yiben shu,
shi Lu Xun xie de.
I buy PART one
book,
be Lu Xun write
"I have bought a book, *(it) is written by Lu Xun."
(6) Wo wen Wang Hong ta mama jintian zou bu zou, ta shuo bu zOU.
I ask Wang Hong her mother today leave not leave, she say no leave
"I ask Wang Hong whether her mother will leave today. She says *(she) won't leave."
However, some exceptions can be found in English. In colloquial English, in certain
contexts, it does allow null subjects, as seen in the following examples:
(7) - What are you doing?
- Studying for the test.
(8) - Why didn't you pass?
- Didn't study enough.
Nevertheless, this does not make English a null-subject language. It is argued that
this phenomenon arises mainly with first and second person pronouns, whereas in third
person contexts, overt subjects would generally be required.
Another possibility is that English generally allows unemphatic sentence-initial
3 An asterisk "*,, indicates an ungrammatical sentence