PDF《The second language acquisition of》

ye3'

and Cantonese '

dou1'

to represent additive operators in Mandarin and in Cantonese, which could not show the whole picture of the acquisition of Mandarin additive operators by Cantonese learners. Keywords Additive adverb, focus marker, second language acquisition, Mandarin, Cantonese i TABLE TABLE TABLE TABLE OF OF OF OF CONTENTS CONTENTS CONTENTS CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS.i TABLES AND FIGURES.iii 1. Introduction.2 2. Additive focus operators in Mandarin and Cantonese: An Overview.5 2.1 Focus Operators.5 2.1.1 Association of focus.5 2.1.2 Additive operators.6 2.2 A comparison of additive operators between Mandarin and Cantonese.7 2.2.1 Mandarin additive operators.7 2.2.2 Cantonese additive operators.9 2.3 Mandarin '

ye3'

and Cantonese additive '

dou1'

: A Linguistics Analysis.11 2.3.1 Mandarin '

ye3'

11 2.3.2 Cantonese additive '

dou1'

14 2.3.3 A comparison.15 3. Quantification in Mandarin and in Cantonese.16 3.1 General Properties of Universal Quantification.16 3.1.1 Universal quantification.16 3.1.2 The quantification of additive focus operators.17 3.2 Universal quantification in Mandarin.17 3.3.1 Mandarin '

dou1'

17 3.3.2 Mandarin '

mei3'

20 3.3 Universal quantification in Cantonese.21 3.3.1 Cantonese universal quantificational '

dou1'

21 3.3.2 Other universal quantifiers in Cantonese.22 3.4 Comparison between '

dou1'

and '

ye3'

in Mandarin.22 4. Previous Acquisition Studies.25 4.1 Acquisition Approaches.25 4.1.1 UG and SLA.25 4.1.2 SLA Theories applied to this study.25 4.1.2 Acquisition studies on additive focus operators.26 4.1.3 Acquisition studies on universal quantification.29 4.2 Research questions and hypotheses.31 4.3 Four types of context in the current study.32 5. Methodology.35 5.1 Participant.35 5.2 Experiment Design.35 6. Results and Analysis.37 6.1 General Description.37 6.2 Additive operator '

ye3'

(Type A and type B)40 6.2.1 Type A (focus on subject)40 6.2.2 Type B (focus on VP)41 6.3 Universal quantificationa'

dou1'

(Type C and Type D)43 ii 6.3.1 Type C (Universal '

all'

43 6.3.2 Type D (Universal '

each'

44 6.4 Individual Achievement of each stimulus.45 7. Discussion.46 8. Conclusion.50 Acknowledge.52 References.53 Appendix 1.55 iii TABLES TABLES TABLES TABLES AND AND AND AND FIGURES FIGURES FIGURES FIGURES Table

1 Sentences types.36 Table

2 Mean scores and standard deviations of non-native speakers and native speakers.38 Table

3 Mean achievement scores of each stimulus (based on logits derived from recoded data)39 Table

4 Summary of the statistical analysis.46 Figure

1 syntactic position of Cantonese additive particles (Lee 2005)9

2 1. Introduction1 While Cantonese and Mandarin are said to be dialects of each other, significant distinctions in their syntactic and semantic representations are still observed. When this observation is placed in the context of Cantonese learners of Mandarin, a legitimate question to ask in the context of second language acquisition is whether Cantonese learners of Mandarin are transferring their knowledge of Cantonese in the acquisition of Mandarin grammar. In this study, we mainly investigated the acquisition of Mandarin additive focus adverb '

ye3'

by Cantonese learners, in contrast to the acquisition of the universal quantificational '

dou1'

. Mandarin '

ye3'

is chosen as a domain of this acquisition study, firstly because it is representative of the additive focus operators in Mandarin. Additive focus operators are semantic operators that bring adding meanings to the sentence and interacting with the foci (the focused constituent), triggering a set of alternative presuppositions in the discourse. The acquisition of additive focus operator is thus part of the acquisition of focus structures. Furthermore, the counterpart of Mandarin '