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Article published In: Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism
Vol. 2:4 (2012) ► pp.404–438

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Knowledge of English verb phrase ellipsis by speakers of Arabic and Chinese

 | University of Essex
Published online: 30 November 2012
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lab.2.4.03haw
English verb phrase ellipsis (VPE) involves both syntactic and discourse information. The present study investigates knowledge of these properties by L1 speakers of Arabic and Mandarin Chinese. Three issues are addressed. Can the participants acquire syntactic properties of VPE that differ from their L1s and are under-determined by positive evidence? Can they acquire all of the syntactic properties of VPE that differ from their L1s? Can they successfully integrate their knowledge of the syntax of VPE with discourse information determining felicity? Results from a sentence completion judgement task are broadly consistent with the L2 participants having Universal Grammar (UG)-constrained grammars for VPE, and with their being able to successfully integrate syntactic representations with discourse information. A persistent problem with an uninterpretable feature is discussed, as are the implications of the findings for the claim that VPE involves gradient grammaticality.
Article outline
  • 1.Three topics in SLA research and the relevance of verb phrase ellipsis
  • 2.Aims of the article
  • 3.Theoretical approaches to VPE
    • 3.1Syntactic approaches
      • 3.1.1Licensing of ellipsis
      • 3.1.2Elision is non-pronunciation rather than retrieval of missing material
      • 3.1.3Identification of unpronounced material
      • 3.1.4The parallelism requirement on VPE
    • 3.3A syntax-and-processing approach to VPE
  • 4.Assumptions made in the present study and what L2 speakers have to acquire
    • 4.1Assumptions
    • 4.2What L2 speakers have to acquire
      • 4.2.1Syntactic knowledge
      • 4.2.2Discourse knowledge
      • 4.2.3Ability to ‘recycle’ non-parallel antecedents
  • 5.A study of the intuitions about English VPE of native speakers and L1 speakers of Arabic and Chinese
    • 5.1Ellipsis in Arabic and Mandarin
    • 5.2Predictions
    • 5.3Materials
    • 5.4Participants
    • 5.5Procedure
    • 5.6Scoring
    • 5.7Results
      • 5.7.1Proficiency test
      • 5.7.2Sentence completion judgement task
  • 6.Discussion
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
References (29)
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