On The Developing Syntactic Style Of Chinese L2 English Learners--From Overt To Optional Marking

This paper is about the developing syntactic style of Chinese L2 English learners as a learning group. In contrast with the lexical items with descriptive content obligatory in language acquisition, functional categories, either overtly- or covertly-specified, imply the universal features and parameters of all human languages, both inflectional like English and non-inflectional like Chinese (Radford, 2000:F15). In the case of Chinese L2 English learners, their English proficiency and Chinese transfer are the two principal factors that determine the range of alternatives available in their mental grammar, which affect learners' linguistic choice for language production. Like L1 acquisition, L2 learners' syntactic development also experiences the three stages of VP, IP and CP. An L2 learners' initial state results in the VP-style of early syntactic production. As the L2 mental grammar matures, the internal IP goes from the minimally- to fully-specified until CP appears, the maximal projection of a sentence. The head of CP functions as an interface, linking the proposition and pragmatic fuaction of an IP, and therefore marking the illocutionary force of a sentence (Radford, 2000:F20). CP accordingly belongs to a contextual or discoursal concept. To be appropriate, utterances in discourses or contexts are sometimes obliged to be in overt forms, and sometimes in covert forms, which are propitious to the development of contextual proposition. An overt VP and a covert CP are quite similar in linear form, but differ a lot in tree structure. The proposal of 'overtly-specified' and 'covertly-specified' provides us a new perspective to SLA research, from which we can not only deal with grammatical appropriateness, but also pragmatic appropriateness of L2 learners' utterances. Both grammatical and pragmatic appropriateness are within the same continuum, though not at the same hierarchical level. The former is a precondition of the latter; and the latter is constrained by the availability of pragmatic module. This study is intended to be one-dimensional, focusing on L2 learners' 'syntactic choice' and aiming at the goal of explanatory adequacy. The perspectives of this study and some key terms like 'style' and 'choice' are the points for chapter 1. And chapter 2 is a literature review.Style is implicated in linguistic structures, and structures are chiefly manifested with functional categories in Generative Grammar. Different functional categories represent different hierarchical syntactic structures that can hallmark the style features of L2 learners' speech production. Chapter 3 and 4 are mainly about the problem of grammatical appropriateness. The two chapters can be viewed differently, either from the diachronic stages of syntactic development or from the synchronic description of learners' syntax at given stage. Chapter 3 is based on the following two assumptions. Firstly, according to 'Minimal tree' theory, there is no functional category in early L2 syntax; andsecondly, L1 functional category can not intercede in early L2 syntax (Ellis, 1999a:187; Yip, 1995:161; Zheng,2003). We hypothesize from the above assumptions that a striking feature of L2 beginners' syntax is the VP-style constrained by UG, and that bare verbs and down-graded constructions are quite popular in L2 early production. An investigation named DA for our hypothesis has been carried out, showing that the forty-four subjects' syntactic constructions are in congruence with our early expectations. The limited range of alternative forms in the mental grammar can account for such a VP-style in early L2 acquisition; the fewer alternative forms for the same proposition there are, the fewer deviations in the choice of syntactic constructions. In chapter 4, we have further elaborated the features of those transitional UG-driven constructions with the two emerging sentence patterns: interrogatives and negatives. Various motivations are given in this chapter for L2 syntactic deviations. However in DB and DC where the subjects are senior middle school...