The Study On The Variable Use Of English Declarative Complementizers By Chinese Learners Of English

There is little doubt that non-native language acquisition exhibits early stages during which the forms associated with functional categories are often omitted or only variably produced. The Minimal Trees Hypothesis (MTH) proposes that all functional projections are absent in the very early stages of L2 development because functional categories are not subject to transfer effects. According to the MTH, the initial absence of surface morphology is taken as evidence for the absence of functional categories.This study sets out to investigate: (1) whether LI functional categories transfer to the L2 initial state and (2) whether initial L2 grammars lack functional categories as proposed in the MTH. On the basis of the results on the acquisition of English declarative complementizer system by Chinese learners of English, the author argues that the data in this study appear to be difficult to explain within Vainikka and Young-Scholten's successive stages theory, where the development is supposed to depend on the acquisition of some functional elements, as reflected in overt morphology.The study shows that Chinese EFL (English as a foreign language) learners exhibit optionality in their use of declarative complementizers, sometimes being present and sometimes absent in L2 production data. As for the elementary Chinese EFL learners, they show overall preference for omitting the overt complementizer in their IL data. Arguments for the Minimal Trees Hypothesis are typically based on the early absence of morphophonological material associated with functional projections. Thus the absence of complementizers from early subordinate clauses has been interpreted in the MTH as evidence for the early absence of CP. However, contrary to the claims of the MTH, the results from the production task show that the beginners' IL grammar has complementation although there is no overt COMP as the head of the complement. The author argues that although initial L2 grammars lack lexical complementizersAihis is not evidence of a comp-less grammar. Instead, it is argtfed that COMP contains a null complementizer which, although it has no phonological matrix, hassufficient syntactic content to generate subordination in the learners' English IL grammar.In the analysis of the results, possible interpretations are given to account for the systematic omission of overt declarative complementizer in the IL data. First, the learners may transfer their LI declarative COMP into their L2 grammar. Secondly, the usage in some structures might be overgeneralized. Thirdly, the null COMP is resorted to as a default form in this case. Furthermore, the absence of declarative COMP overt that may be due to the lag in the acquisition of lexical complementizers, which is an effect of lexical learning. It is then argued that the absence of the lexical complementizer in the acquisition is a surface manifestation of phonological underspecification rather than grammatical or syntactic under specification.With a view to the above-mentioned research findings, the author argues that contrary to the 'no functional categories in initial L2 grammars' view expressed in the MTH, functional categories not only exist in the early L2 grammar but possibly come from the LI grammar.