Markedness Differential Hypothesis And First Language Transfer: An Empirical Study

Language transfer has been a central issue in second language acquisition (SLA) for at least a century. As to when the transfer occurs, the early theories, such as Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis and Interlanguage Hypothesis, fail to provide a satisfactory answer. With the strong influences of Universal Grammar and Typological Universals, more researchers come to study transfer from the perspective of linguistic universals. One of the most famous and influential hypotheses is that linguistically unmarked features of the first language (L1) will tend to transfer, but the linguistically marked L1 features will not. This hypothesis has been supported by many western studies, but few researches have been conducted in China. A contrastive analysis was carried out to see the similarities and differences between English and Chinese on the level of word order, clausal negation and relative clauses. Based on the typological criteria for determining the level of markedness, we assumed that (i) the OSV order of Chinese declaratives is marked and less likely to transfer into interlanguage; (ii) the preverbal negation of Chinese clause is unmarked and thus is submitted to transfer; and (iii) the left branching relative clause in Chinese is a highly marked construction and thus is less likely to transfer. These served as the working hypotheses of our study. We thus designed an acceptability judgment test and a translation test to testify these hypotheses. The acceptability judgment test consisted of 30 English sentences, with word order, clausal negation and relative clauses being the three testing points. The translation test consisted of 15 Chinese sentences, with all the testing points being the same with those in the acceptability judgment test. Our 349 subjects were from Henan University and its affiliated middle school. They consisted of second year junior middle school students, first year senior middle school students, third year senior middle school students and college sophomores. Those 30 undergraduates and graduates from Clemson University in the U.S. formed the control group. Data analysis involved two tasks: (i) for grammaticality judgment test, we did the necessary arithmetical operations to describe and compare the grades for each testing point between different groups; (ii) for translation test, we conducted the error analysis and picked out the transfer errors. The results of the two tests are basically the same: (i) OSV Chinese declaratives will not transfer to English; (ii) the preverbal feature of clausal negation in Chinese tends to transfer; and (iii) the left-branching feature of Chinese relative clause is obviously subject to transfer. In the above findings, (i) and (ii) support the hypothesis, while (iii) proves to be a counterexample. To the extent that marked structures are not expected to undergo transfer, the systematic transfer of left-branching relative clauses comes as a surprise. If our findings were proved valid by more researches, then the above hypothesis needs to be reconsidered—sometimes marked L1 features may also be transferred. This thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter I is a general introduction to the study. In chapter II, a historical review on first language transfer is presented in detail. Our review covers the discussions of L1 transfer in Contrastive Analysis, Error Analysis, Interlanguage theory and the Universal Hypothesis. At the end of the chapter, we put forward the general assumption of the thesis. It is specified into three more detailed ones in Chapter III. A contrastive study is carried out on the syntactic level concerning word order, negation and relative clauses between English and Chinese. On the basis of typological criteria for determining markedness, three working hypotheses are formed. Chapter IV describes the methodology. We describe in detail the subjects, instruments, data-collection and data-analysis in the study. Results of the experiment are presented with discussions in Chapter V. The last chapter is the conclusion of the whole thesis.