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The second language acquisition of additive focus operator: A pilot study of Cantonese learners acquiring Mandarin '

ye3'

Qi Cheng Master of Arts, Chinese Linguistics and Language Acquisition 2011-2012 Chinese University of Hong Kong Professor Gladys Tang Wai Lan July 21th ,

2012 i ABSTRACT Mandarin '

ye3'

is an additive focus operator, which triggers a set of presupposition and select the contrastive information as its domain of application (its scope) to imply the additive meaning of '

also'

.

There is no particle '

ye3'

in oral Cantonese. In Cantonese, the additive meaning of '

also'

is mostly carried by preverbal adverb '

dou1'

, which also plays the role of universal quantification. Despite of their similar semantic interpretation, Mandarin '

ye3'

and Cantonese additive '

dou1'

show different scope properties. Mandarin '

ye3'

has a wide scope reading, meaning that it can take either the constituents preceding it or following it into its scope. In contrast, Cantonese '

dou1'

requires a narrow scope reading and take only the constituents preceding it into its scope. Both Cantonese and Mandarin have this homophonous particle '

dou1'

in their language encoding similar universal meaning, which share the meaning of '

all'

and '

each/every'

. However, in Mandarin, '

ye3'

and '

dou1'

share mutually exclusive semantic meaning, with '

ye3'

meaning additive '

also'

and '

dou1'

meaning universal '

all'

or '

every/each'

. Thus, we questioned whether Cantonese learners of Mandarin encountered difficulty in acquiring Mandarin additive '

ye3'

and universal '

dou1'

as two distinctive semantic operators. In this paper, we will first examine the prosodic, syntactic and semantic properties of Mandarin '

ye3'

, '

dou1'

and Cantonese '

dou1'

, and make comparisons between these operators. Then we will provide a review on some relevant second language acquisition (SLA) theories, together with acquisition studies involving additive operators and universal quantification in first language acquisition (FLA) and SLA. By way of a preference task, in which we requested the Cantonese learners of Mandarin to rank their acceptability between sentences with '

ye3'

, '

dou1'

and with no such adverb under four contexts, we observed that Cantonese learners could generally acquire additive '

ye3'

with focus on subject, and universal '

dou1'

meaning '

all'

, while they encountered difficulty in acquiring additive '

ye3'

with focus on VP, and universal '

dou1'

preceded by '

mei3'

to show distributiveness meaning '

each/every'

. Moreover, they normally could not fully exclude the non-target adverb ('

dou1'

in additive sentences and '

ye3'

in universal sentences), which suggests transfer of the ii polysemy '

dou1'

in their L1 to additive '

ye3'

and universal '

dou1'

in L2 Mandarin. This results in '

ye3'

and '

dou1'

in their developing L2 Mandarin grammar being ambiguous between additive meaning and universal quantificational meaning. The result thus does not support a full transfer, full Universal Grammar (UG) access view to second language acquisition, but a partial availability of UG view. As a pilot study, the main limitations of this study are that we only collected one set of data from Cantonese learners of Mandarin, and that we only selected Mandarin '