Syntactic Representation And Processing Of English In Chinese Bilinguals

Bilingual syntactic representation and processing concern issues on howbilingual speakers represent syntactic knowledge of their first and second languages,and on how they process syntactic representations to produce proper utterances inboth languages. Cross-linguistic studies have shown that syntactic representations areshared among languages.This thesis conducts a corpus-based analysis of with-in English syntactic primingin Chinese-English bilingual groups. On the one hand, it aims to find out whethersyntactic priming effects occur in the language data of Chinese EFL learners. Whileon the other hand, the thesis sets out to establish the representations of secondlanguage syntactic structures for Chinese English learners.Syntactic priming refers to the tendency for speakers to repeat syntacticstructures they have just encountered, either in production or in comprehension.Specifically, by looking at the priming of second language syntactic structures that areavailable in bilinguals’ first language but not in their second language, we can getsome information on how syntactic structures are represented and processed in theirlanguage system.The study on with-in English syntactic priming adopts language data from boththe ICE-GB corpus and the SECCL2.0corpus. It detects the priming effect fortransitive utterances and for dative alternations throughout the corpora. Structuresneeded are retrieved and classified into prime-target groups for further analysis anddiscussion. The result shows that while syntactic priming effects are found in bothsyntactic structures in native speakers’ language data, the priming effects forChinese-English speakers occur for dative structures but are absent for transitivestructures. The syntactic priming effects, therefore, show a strong influence of the firstlanguage. Based on the results obtained from the research, the thesis then works outan extended version of Bernolet et al.’s model on lemma-based syntacticrepresentation, to illustrate the syntactic representation and processing ofChinese-English bilingual speakers.