Second Language Acquisition Of Chinese Renhe And Indefinite Wh-Expressions By English-Speaking Learners Of Chinese

This thesis investigates the second language acquisition of Chinese polarity items by English-speaking learners of Chinese. Two major parts comprise the whole work: a study of learner's acquisition of Chinese renhe and indefinite wh-phrase shenme, and an experiment on the learners' knowledge of the distribution of these two items.Independent accounts of the distribution of renhe and that of indefinite shenme are given. It's observed that Chinese renhe has a similar distribution to English any. Generally speaking, both of them are not allowed in veridical contexts. The distribution of indefinite shenme overlaps with that of renhe and any in the following contexts: yes-no question, overt negation and conditional clauses. Additionally, shenme can also appear in some veridical context (i.e. sentences with overt aspectual markers). On the other hand, renhe and shenme are, according to Hsiao (2002), sensitive to different modalities. Root modality allows renhe but not shenme, while epistemic modality allows shenme instead of renhe.Given renhe has a close counterpart any in English. It is expected that English-speaking learners of Chinese should have a quick grasp of the distribution of renhe. Considering indefinite shenme does not have such an equivalent in English, the English-speaking learners should have more difficulty acquiring the distribution of shenme. A written sentence completion task was carried out to check the relevant hypothesis and predictions. The results show that L1 knowledge facilitates the learning of renhe to some extent. And it seems that learners' L1 knoweledge of English wh-phrases does not have adverse effects on the learning of Chinese indefinite shenme. It's also suggested that there is not an obvious advantage to acquiring the lexical items which have close counterparts in the mother tongue.