| This thesis examines the unlearning of null subjects in Chinese speakers’acquisition of L2English. Chinese is generally considered to be a null-subjectlanguage. Distinct from some other null-subject languages with rich inflections,Chinese lacks morphological changes. Thus the interpretation of many Chinese nullsubjects relies on the context; without appropriate context a Chinese sentence withnull subject may be incomprehensible or ambiguous in meaning. Besides limitedtypes of single sentences and embedded sentences, Chinese null subjects appearmore frequently in the topic chain, which is the basic unit of syntax in Chinese,compared with sentences in English.Based on an analysis of the distribution of Chinese null subjects, the presentstudy focuses on the null subjects used in topic chains. Five situations are discussedin which the null subject refers to different constituents of the preceding clause in thesame topic chain. The situations are: null subject referring to the object of thepreceding clause, null subject referring to the attributive of the preceding clause, nullsubject referring to the subject of an objective clause of the preceding clause, nullsubject referring to the object of a pivotal construction of the preceding clause, nullsubject referring to the preceding whole sentence. The purpose of the study is to findout whether such referential relations would influence the Chinese learners’judgment in rejecting null subject in English sentences.The test results show that none of the five kinds of referential relations hasinfluence on the Chinese learners’ judgments. The Chinese students rely onsyntactical rather than pragmatic factors in judging the grammaticality of an Englishsentence. However, their sense of acceptance seems independent in their L2development at the discourse level. As the students’ English proficiency increases, they tend to rely more on pragmatic factors and judge some sentences to be‘ungrammatical but acceptable’. |
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