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.

Cheung (1998) identified that Right Dislocation in Cantonese and that in European languages like Italian and English are vastly different. Despite the differences he pointed out, he did not proceed to conclude that what he regarded as the most common type of RD in Cantonese, namely Gap Right Dislocation, is an independent phenomenon. It should be separated with what we commonly refer to as RD, and be analyzed on its own right.

On the other hand, while Cheung regarded Pronominal Right Dislocation to be an equivalent of RD in European languages, I will show that although the two kinds of RD belong to the same phenomenon, Cantonese RD actually has its own specific behaviors, and is not an exact copy of RD in European languages. I will especially compare RD in Italian with that in Cantonese, because of their being pro-drop languages and because Italian RD is more extensively studied.

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 In the realm of linguistic study, it is commonly accepted that individual sounds do not represent any particular meanings. It is, for instance, meaningless to ask what [p] or [a] mean. The sound for the word of a particular meaning is arbitrary; therefore there is generally no connection between sound and meaning. This, however, […]

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 […]