In both English and Chinese,reflexives are bound only by the DP,however,reflexive pronouns in English and Chinese differ with respect to locality condition.English reflexives can take local DPs as their antecedents and long-distance DPs are not legitimate antecedents whereas Chinese monomorphemic reflexive ‘ziji’ can be bound either to a local DP or to a long-distance(LD)DP.Given the differences in referential characteristics between English and Chinese,this study aims to examine whether Chinese EFL learners can correctly interpret English anaphors,and whether English proficiency and L1 transfer affect the acquisition of English reflexives.A truth-value judgment(TVJT)task is employed in this thesis which provides a story including 2 to 5 sentences,followed by a comment sentence.Participants are required to read the 40 stories and then indicate whether the following comment sentence matches or mismatches the situation provided in the story.The comment sentences following the stories fall into three types to investigate Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of locality,which are: finite embedded clauses,nonfinite embedded clauses and monoclauses with possessed picture noun phrases(PPNP).The result of this study indicates that Chinese EFL learners abide by the locality rules perform better in biclausal sentences with finite embedded clauses than in biclausal sentences with nonfinite embedded clauses.They also do better in biclausal sentences than in monoclausal sentences with possessed picture noun phrases.The acquisition of locality improves with English proficiency.Phase theory and L1 transfer are proposed in this thesis to account for the differences within as well as between groups.It is argued that completeness and head category of phases play an important role in the interpretation of English reflexives,which give rise to the asymmetries in the acquisition of locality,and L1 transfer occurs mainly at the elementary or intermediate stage of second language acquisition. |