Browsing by Subject "Chinese language"
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Item The acquisition of French by Chinese native speakers : influence from L1 or L2?(2006-05) Kao, Ju-hui; Meier, Richard P.The primary purpose of the study is to investigate whether learners' L1 or L2 plays a more influential role in their L3 acquisition. This study also seeks to discover the factors attributed to the influence, such as language typological distance and learning strategies. A total of 33 subjects are Taiwanese college students who have Chinese L1 and English L2 learn French as their L3. The survey asks the participants to finish a French test, which has 30 questions. Half of the questions have sentences with parallel structures in English and French, whereas the other half of questions have sentences with nonparallel structures. Quantitative results indicate that learners have significantly higher performance over the sentences where English and French do not have parallel structures. It draws a conclusion that English, as learners' L2, affects learners' L3 acquisition more because English and French are typologically closer. The learners also tend to apply the learning strategies that they use to acquire the second language to learn their third language.Item Acquisition of Mandarin phonology: segment versus tone(Texas Tech University, 1980-12) Hong, Li-janeThis study has as its focus the early phonological development of a single Chinese child (L). The period of study ranged from ages 1;6 to 1;10. Specifically, the relationship between early segment and early tone development was studied. In the field of child language, it is not unusual to find valuable research carried out with a limited number of subjects or even a single subject. Studies by Labov and Labov (1978), Shibamoto and Olmsted (1978), Ferguson and Farwell (1975), Ingram (1974), Smith (1973) and Moskowitz (1970) have contributed valuable information regarding early child language development. It is important to note that studies dealing with few subjects or a single subject have demonstrated that individual paths of language learning are more instructive and informative than those which have as their main purpose the identification of universal tendencies (Ferguson and Farwell, 1975).Item On the form and meaning of Chinese bare conditionals : not just "whatever"(2010-12) Huang, Yahui, 1973-; Beaver, David I., 1966-; Asher, Nicholas; Beavers, John; Aristar-Dry, Helen; King, Robert; Wechsler, StephenThe syntactic and semantic treatment of Chinese Bare Conditionals is a topic of much debate (Cheng and Huang 1996; Lin 1996; Chierchia 2000). This dissertation investigates the nature of Chinese Bare Conditionals in three aspects: quantification and modal implications as compared to English free relatives with –ever, and pronoun occurrence. With regard to quantification, I propose to treat the anteceding wh-phrase and its anaphoric element (pronoun/wh-word) uniformly as a definite description denoting a maximal plural entity similar to Jacobson (1995). This entity can be an atomic entity resulting in a singular definite reading, or an entity consisting of more than one atom deriving a universal-like reading. Concerning modal implication, I propose to capture the agent’s/speaker’s indifference reading of bare conditionals with von Fintel (2000). Indifference reading in his analysis is interpreted against a counterfactual modal base which predicts a causal link. His analysis is needed for the interpretation of Chinese bare conditionals but may not be applied directly to whatever, given that a causal link is necessarily present in a bare conditional, but not required in an English whatever-sentence. I argue that the use of a pronoun in a bare conditional is not subject to a uniqueness and existence condition as claimed in Lin (1996). Although bare conditionals typically contain two identical wh-words, they may occur naturally with a pronoun that links bare conditionals with other sentences into a piece of coherent discourse. This account bears an important implication for the study of Chinese wh-phrases and third person pronouns in being able to predict the existence of anaphoric definite wh-phrases and bound-variable pronouns in the language. It also improves on existing accounts of Chinese bare conditionals in being able to capture the details of the form and meaning of this construction. Chinese bare conditionals are structurally related to ruguo ‘if’-conditionals and Hindi left-adjoined correlatives and their meaning is similar to, and yet not quite the same as that of whatever.