Acquisition of definiteness marking in L2 Mandarin Chinese by English native speakers

Abstract

The marking of definiteness involves both lexical and syntactic devices in Mandarin Chinese. Using a picture-description production task and a felicity judgment task, this study compared a group of 34 intermediate-to-advanced second language Mandarin Chinese learners from English-speaking countries with native speakers, in their performance on definiteness expressions. The results indicate that the second language learners of Mandarin Chinese are not nativelike in mapping the nominal forms onto definiteness. They also lack knowledge of the subject definiteness constraint operant in Mandarin Chinese. It is proposed that the difficulty may be due to the interference of first language grammar as well as the interface nature of definiteness marking.