Markedness And The Acquisition Of English Topic-related Constructions

The notion of markedness, originating with the Prague school phonology, has been defined in quite a number of different ways. Yet, underlying all of the definitions is the notion that some linguistic features are more "basic" in relation to others, which are "special". The more basic linguistic features are considered unmarked and the special linguistic features marked.This dissertation takes the linguistic theory of markedness as its theoretical pillar and investigates the acquisition of English topic-related syntactic structures on the part of Chinese college students, namely, topicalization, left dislocation, raising, cleft, it extraposition, existential there and passivized constructions.Previous researchers address the issue from a typological perspective (Schachter & Rutherford,1979; Rutherford,1983; Yip,1995; Han,2000). They point out that there is a syntacticization process of interlanguage progressing from topic-comment to subject-predicate for Chinese learners and that in this process the transfer of Chinese topic-comment features is dominant and persistent. In considering just one type of English topic constructions at a time and highlighting the transfer of typological topic-comment patterns from Chinese to English, the typological perspective pays no attention to the different influences on acquisition brought about by the syntactic differences between those structures and accordingly minimizes the effect that the syntactic dimension of the various English topic-related constructions can have on acquisition.Bearing the inherent limitations of the typological perspective in mind, we aim to unveil the influence of the syntactic mechanisms of English topic sentences on acquisition by adopting a unique perspective of markedness. First, we hold that markedness is a language-particular notion—what is marked in one language may be unmarked in another. Second, without considering the pragmatic aspect of topic sentences, we apply the markedness analysis to the syntactic aspect of topic constructions only. Third, we make use of different criteria to determine the markedness status of Chinese topic constructions and English topic constructions. For the Chinese topic constructions, frequency is used as the main criterion; for the English topic constructions, we take their markedness to be measured roughly by the number of movements necessary for their derivation from lexical projections. While frequency is obviously a criterion suggested by Greensberg (1966), the criterion employed to evaluate markedness of English topic-related structures is apparently taken from Chomsky (1973,1989). On this premise, we derive a markedness hierarchy of the various English topic-related constructions and a markedness dichotomy of corresponding topic constructions in Chinese.The experimental study consists of two elicitation tasks, namely, a Translation Task and an Essay-writing Task. The Translation Task involves 19 Chinese sentences to be translated into various English topic constructions. The Essay-writing Task invites the participants to describe three pictures which are in a chronological sequence and contain three different animal characters. The participants in the current study are 96 Chinese learners of English. They are non-English majors in a Chinese university with different language backgrounds, ranging in proficiency from LevelⅡto Level V of a 4-level integrated course program offered by the university.The results reveal that markedness plays an important role in the acquisition of English topic-related constructions. On the one hand, the difficulty degree of these topic constructions for Chinese learners generally corresponds to their degree of markedness. On the other, learners' interlanguage would exhibit characteristics traceable to the markedness of these topic constructions, namely, the more marked the topic constructs are, the more probably the learners would use the universal syntactic pattern and the less probably the learners would use the marked topic constructions and vice versa. This is better illustrated by a curve diagram with the horizontal axis marking a continuum of English topic constructs in terms of markedness and the vertical axis the production of the topic constructs by Chinese learners. It is also revealed that topic-comment transfer from Chinese to learners' interlanguage is likely to be triggered by somewhat marked and more marked yet not most marked topic constructions. This indicates that markedness hierarchy within English the target language mainly influences degree of difficulty in acquisition and determines interlanguage patterns, and that Chinese topic-comment transfer plays just a secondary part. Put differently, in learners'syntactic development of a second language the target language system predominates in the interaction with the native language system.The present research has both theoretical and pedagogical implications for second language acquisition. Theoretically, the application of markedness theory into the present study attests that particular approaches to linguistic theory could provide a uniform account of learners'linguistic knowledge and inform us greatly about how second languages are learned. Pedagogically, given the importance of markedness in acquisition of English topic structures, great importance should be attached to marked English structures in teaching practice and learners'ability to analyze and use marked English structures should be enhanced.