Topic-prominent Features In Chinese Learners’ English

Given the typological differences between Chinese and English,a question in present research to address is whether and how topic-prominent(TP)features affect English development of L1-Chinese learners when the two opposing languages make up the acquisition context via examining the non-target like structures surfacing in learners’ interlanguage(spoken and written)and their pattern of occurrence.200 corpora were randomly selected from the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SWECCL)taking two factors into consideration--English proficiency level and production form.Five major manifestations of interlanguage structures with TP features were tagged,i.e.,topic-comment construction,zero anaphora,existential construction,pseudo-passive and periphrastic construction,and their forming processes were analyzed and discussed to explore the unlearning difficulty levels.The study reveals that with L1-Chinese learners’ English proficiency improving,the incidences of structures with TP features decrease(intermediate: 7.38%;advanced: 3.59%),approximating subject-prominent language,and that fewer structures with TP features are found in their oral production(7.74%)compared with the written production(3.58%).The use rate of zero anaphora(1.40%)is higher than that of existential construction(0.55%),pseudo-passives(0.42%)and periphrastic construction(0.33%),and topic-comment construction(3.02%),in turn,occurs more frequently than zero anaphora in our participants’ production.Although learners gradually approach to target language,every feature can be found in advanced learners’ production as well,which indicates that they are unable to fully unlearn TP features especially the target-like passive whose use rate is even higher in advanced group,supporting the impairment of interlanguage grammar.As for different manifestations of structures with TP features,this study proposes four main forming processes--moving without restriction,dropping,moving with restriction broken and generating.We find that the forming process has significant influence on the difficulty of unlearning the corresponding TP features.More specifically,the difficulty of unlearning hierarchy can be summarized as space-time construction > zero anaphora > existential construction / pseudo passives / periphrastic construction / left-bearing construction / left-dislocated construction > base-generated construction.