In second language acquisition, learners often replace foreign and unfamiliar sounds in the second language with the ones available in their first language. These replacements are obviously not random; however, what determines how learners replace foreign sounds? The present study is interested to find out the rules governing these replacements, particularly by analyzing common replacements in five target languages and by comparing the articulatory features between the original foreign sounds and the replacing sounds; and see if the occurrence frequency of the phonemes available in the first language would affect the results of these replacements.
Huang (1984) proposes that null object is a variable controlled by a null topic, unlike null subject which is a real null pronoun. This paper tries to verify this proposal by investigating the distribution of null object in Cantonese. It is found that while Huang’s proposal is able to explain the majority part of the distribution of null object, it is unable to give an explanation to several cases related to resultativity and indirect object which disallow null object. A possible explanation is given to account for these cases, which is related to feature checking and a modified version of Huang’s Generalized Control Rule.
Introduction German and English are both Germanic languages; consequently, they share a lot of similarities in terms of the vocabularies. However, due to various historical reasons, the grammar of English has undergone a lot of changes since its divorce from High German. The accumulated result is the often subtle differences in the languages’ grammars, and […]