Chinese Null and Covert Arguments and their Behaviours in L2 Chinese Grammars

Abstract

This study aims to shed light on the debates related to the Interface Hypothesis (IH) (Sorace & Serratrice, 2009), which argues that syntactic properties involving other cognitive domains may not be acquirable. Abundant L2 studies on the IH have focused on null-subject languages with rich inflection. By contrast, less attention has been paid to L2 acquisition of null arguments in languages with no subject-verb agreement, like Chinese. To fill in this gap, this study investigates the interpretation of null subjects and the semantic constraint on null objects in L2 Chinese. However, it has been argued recently that gaps in the subject and object position in some constructions in Chinese should, instead of being seen as “true” null arguments, be viewed as the result of movement and ellipsis (e.g., Holmberg, 2015) (gaps resulting from ellipsis are referred to hereafter as ‘covert arguments’ to distinguish them from ‘null arguments’). Given that previous L2 studies have overlooked the role of ellipsis in accounting for perceived gaps in Chinese, this study investigates covert arguments in parallel monologues, answers to yes-no questions and wh-questions in L2 Chinese. 176 English-speaking learners of L2 Chinese ranging from beginners to advanced learners and 30 native controls were recruited in this empirical study, which included a cross-modal picture description task, a self-paced reading task, an interpretation task and an acceptability judgement task. Although null and covert arguments share identical surface patterns in Chinese, they derive from distinct underlying syntactic representations. This causes a learnability problem for English-speaking learners of Chinese. Specifically, their L1 English allows neither null nor covert arguments, and they are faced with the challenge of distinguishing between these two different underlying structures in L2 Chinese. By investigating the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic/discourse properties of null and covert arguments in L2 Chinese, the empirical study finds that L1-L2 difference is not a problem specific to interfaces per se. Other factors such as computational complexity, proficiency, L1-L2 asymmetry, input and different L1-L2 cue weighting strategies should all be considered when explaining L1-L2 convergence or non-convergence.