A Study Of Null Objects In Chinese Speakers' L2 English

Null objects are allowed in Chinese, but not in English. In L2 acquisition, Chinese learners of English face the problem of unlearning null objects. This paper investigates the unlearning of null objects in Chinese learners'L2 English and tries to explore whether transfer will occur in the L2 acquisition and to what extent the L1 will influence the L2 acquisition. The paper first explores the difference between Chinese and English concerning null objects. In the second part, the author explores the status of Chinese null objects and the previous studies are reviewed to reveal the mechanisms behind the existence of null objects in Chinese. Next, some related L1 and L2 acquisition theories are introduced and the problems caused by null objects in L2 literature are addressed. An experiment is designed to explore the influence of null objects on the Chinese learners'L2 English. 79 Chinese learners and 11 native speakers of English took part in the experiment and the result indicates that all the Chinese learner groups behave differently from the native speaker group. Chinese learners have difficulty in detecting the ungrammaticality caused by null objects in their L2 English. The difficulty may be attributed to the unequivalence between Chinese and English VP ellipsis, the different syntactic unit (Chinese takes topic chain as the largest syntactic unit, while in English CP is the largest syntactic unit) or the [+topic-drop] parameter in Chinese.