A Contrastive Study On English And Chinese Elliptical Structures And Their Influence On Second Language Acquisition

This thesis examines acquisition of the distribution constraint on English elliptical constructions, in particular, gapping and VP ellipsis, by Chinese-speaking learners of English, through a grammaticality judgment test. Chinese has a stricter restriction on verb gapping than English, while sharing the equivalent grammatical constraint on VP ellipsis with English. The thesis intends to know how the distributional similarities and differences between English and Chinese with regard to gapping and VP ellipsis interact, and whether it is possible for learners to unlearn aspects of L1 grammar in the absence of negative evidence in the L2, if L1 transfer occurs at early stages of acquisition. Judgments by 27 junior high school students, 38 senior high school students, 39 university English major students, plus 18 native speakers of English, were obtained.The overall test results indicate that L1 transfer can be selective, and that while positive evidence helps restructure learner interlanguage grammar, absence of negative evidence either will not affect learners' early assumptions about L2 grammar if they happen to be right, or will take a long time to change learners' early assumptions about L2 grammar if they happen to be wrong.