Second language acquisition of topic-comment structures in Mandarin Chinese

The typological difference between Chinese as a topic-prominent language and English as a subject-prominent language raises questions for the theoretical analysis of topic-comment structures (TCSs) in Chinese and the second language acquisition (SLA) of these structures: (1) How can TCSs in Chinese be described and categorized according to their semantic and syntactic characteristics? (2) How are these TCSs acquired by second language learners whose L1 is not topic-comment? (3) What do the characteristics of this learning process reveal about SLA?; The theoretical analysis of the present study describes the characteristics of the TCSs in Chinese and compares them to those in English. It shows that, although topic-comment is a universal feature of language, TCSs are not a homogeneous group. Their semantic and syntactic characteristics led to a systematic categorization of TCSs in Chinese. It was hypothesized that, due to the importance of the notion of topic and the large number of TCSs used in Chinese, the acquisition of TCSs would be an important part of the acquisition of the Chinese language. Different TCSs could cause different degrees of difficulty in acquisition.; Two experiments were carried out to test this hypothesis by using learners whose L1 is English. The results show significant differences in the learners' responses to the TCS categories. The different degrees of difficulty is mainly determined by the semantic characteristics of the TCSs and the influence of the learners' L1. This provides explanations for the contradictory claims made in the earlier literature on the topic-comment stage in L2 by showing that, due to the large variety of TCSs and their different degrees of difficulty, the nonuse of certain TCSs cannot be interpreted as the nonexistence of the feature of topic-comment. The results also reveal that the use of TCSs is relatively difficult to acquire due to its involvement of both grammaticality and appropriateness. These two aspects are acquired separately by L2 learners.