Second language acquisition of the features of dou in Mandarin Chinese, by L1-English and L1-Japanese speakers

This thesis reports a study on the acquisition of the features of the quantifier dou, in particular the feature [+Dist] in Mandarin Chinese, by L1-English and L1-Japanese learners. Dou, which is usually on paralleled with all, essentially differentiates from all on both semantic and syntactic properties. These differences partially reflect on the meanings and interpretations of sentences at the syntax-semantics interface. In the light of Features Reassembly Hypothesis, the successful acquisition of dou requires the remapping or reconfiguration of the feature bundles that have already been assembled in the L1 grammar into a new formal configuration in the target language. To explore how L1 English-L2 Mandarin and L1 Japanese-L2 Mandarin learners establish the initial mapping between L1 and L2 forms and how the features are being reassembled, two experimental tasks were conducted: a sentence-picture matching task and a picture-based acceptability judgment task. A total of 51 native English speakers and 18 native Japanese speakers, learning Mandarin as their second language, participated in this study. Their interpretations of dou-quantified subject/numeral-quantified object sentences with mixed predicates and dou-quantified subject/wh-object interrogatives were examined through the two tasks, respectively. The results indicate that in the stage of mapping, most L2 Mandarin learners chose the universals and their relevant features as the starting point (i.e. [+universal] and [+universal, ∨]). Learners with lower proficiency encountered difficulties in overcoming the influence of L1 transfer, whereas those with higher proficiency, who underwent the stage of reassembly, were capable of assigning dou a [+Dist] feature, as the equivalents in their native languages. Additionally, the poverty of the stimulus problem at the interpretive interface can be overcome with the Universal Grammar access.