A Study On The Acquisition Of Null Arguments In Chinese As A Second Language

The study focuses on the role of the mother language and UG in the SLA in the light of Chomsky's P&P. This paper presents an SLA study of null arguments in Chinese involving two groups of English learners. Despite a strict limitation of null arguments in English which is different from Chinese, the learners can acquire the null arguments ultimately. Three experiments are designed to investigate the null arguments in the SLA according to the acceptability, internalization and preference. Statistical results show that there is an asymmetry between null subjects and null objects, an asymmetry between null subjects in the root clause and in the subordinate clause especially when the learners are at low-level. Additionally statistical results show that the different identification results in the asymmetry between null subjects in the root clause and in the subordinate clause. This paper concluded that the asymmetry is a result of parameter-resetting from subject-prominence to topic-prominence and that the mother language and UG interact with the second language simultaneous.