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Article published In:
Journal of Second Language Studies
Vol. 2:1 (2019) ► pp.140–164

Topic prominence in L2 acquisition

Evidence of Chinese-to-English typological transfer

| Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center

This study investigated the topic-prominent characteristics of the interlanguage development of native speakers of Chinese learning English as a foreign language (EFL). Two groups of Chinese EFL learners – an intermediate group and an advanced group – were recruited to complete two production tasks: a written Chinese-to-English translation task and an oral story-retelling task. The findings showed that Chinese EFL learners at each proficiency level transferred Chinese topic-prominent structures to their target language production at a varying degree. The topic-prominent constructions in the learners’ production, based on a hierarchy of difficulty, were placed on two slightly different Gradation Zones, one for written production and the other for oral production. Gradation Zones were a generalized reflection of how discourse and pragmatic relations in topic-prominent Chinese were gradually reanalyzed as syntactic relations with the development of learners’ English proficiency level. There was a tendency for topic-prominent features to decrease and subject-prominent features to increase as EFL learners’ proficiency level progressed. It was also argued that sources of these topic-prominent properties in interlanguage were an interaction of factors, including degree of markedness, perceptual saliency, second language (L2) input, and language production task type.

Keywords: topic prominence, subject prominence, English as a foreign language, interlanguage, typological transfer, gradation zone, markedness, perceptual saliency
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
    • 2.1Language typology: Chinese as a topic-prominent language
    • 2.2Topic-prominent features of Chinese
      • Non-verb-agreement
      • Sentence-initial position
      • Non-dummy-subject
      • Double-nominative constructions
      • Time and locative phrases
    • 2.3Studies on typological transfer of Chinese TP features in English L2 acquisition
  • 3.Research design and methodology
    • 3.1Participants
    • 3.2Instruments and procedure
    • 3.3Test items
      • Absence of existential construction (aec)
      • Absence of dummy subject ‘it’ (ads)
      • Pseudo passive (pp)
      • Double nominative (dn)
      • Verbal subject (vs) (Green, 1996; Li, 2010)
      • Subject-predicate disagreement (spd) (Fuller & Gundel, 1987; Jin, 1994)
      • Zero anaphora subject (zas) and Zero anaphora object (zao)
    • 3.4Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Written production analysis
    • 4.2Oral production analysis
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 18 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/jsls.17016.gon
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