An Empirical Study On The Influence Of Chinese Topic-prominent Features On English Subject Acquisition

Since Zhao Yuanren put forward the concept of Chinese topic in 1968, the similarities and dissimilarities between the two notions, subject and topic, have been discussed by linguists at home and abroad. As a result, topic has obtained its independent position syntactically. Moreover, based on theory of language typology, Charles Li & Sandral Thompson classified world languages roughly into two types, that is, topic-prominent language (TPL) and subject-prominent language (SPL) with Chinese and English as their respective representatives; Besides, they generalized features of TPL and SPL, and examined definitions and characteristics of subject and topic. Guided by these achievements, some linguists have been conducting comparative studies between Chinese and English in terms of subject and topic so as to find out influence of marked items as well as unmarked ones in the learner's mother language on his/her second language acquisition.The majority of former relevant studies explored the developmental pattern of learners' acquisition of subject or topic from typological perspective, and many of them adopted the method Fuller & Gundel used in 1987 to select research elements, such as coding of topic, double-subject construction, zero-NP anaphora, subject-creating construction, dummy subjects and subject-verb agreement.To get more information concerning Chinese TP features' influence on learners' acquisition of English subjects according to the theory of markedness from a micro-angle, four kinds of subjects are selected in this thesis: dummy subject, clausal subject introduced by that, gerund and infinitive. The above four elements are thus chosen because they are marked items that can differentiate English subject from Chinese subject. The purpose of this thesis is to find answer to the research question: To what extent and in what form do topic-prominent features influence Chinese-speaking learners' acquisition of the four linguistic items?Two groups of participants were involved in the study. The advanced group consisted of 28 English majors in their fourth year, and the intermediate group 28 non-English majors in their first year. Both groups came from Shaanxi Normal...