The role of resumption in the acquisition of European Portuguese prepositional relative clauses by Chinese learners

This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Espírito Santo, Ana, Alexandre, Nélia, Perpiñán, Sílvia
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2023
País:España
Institución:Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Repositorio:Repositorio Digital de la UPF
OAI Identifier:oai:repositori.upf.edu:10230/57549
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/57549
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/02676583221137715
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:null-prep
pied-piping
prepositional relative clauses
resumptive pronouns
syntactic islands
Descripción
Sumario:This article reports on an experimental study on the acquisition of prepositional relative clauses in second language European Portuguese by Chinese native speakers. It focuses on the role of resumption, mandatory in prepositional relative clauses in Chinese (the native language of the learners) and non-conventional in European Portuguese (the target language). Results of an oral production task and two online acceptability judgment tasks indicated that resumption does not transfer from the native language, and that Chinese learners of European Portuguese employ movement structures to produce and process relative clauses. Additionally, results showed that resumptive pronouns do not rescue or ameliorate ungrammatical extractions from islands, contrary to what is traditionally assumed in grammatical theory. This finding was kept constant across participants, native and non-native. Overall, we conclude that second language speakers are able to select and reassemble movement features in their non-native language and use similar processing mechanisms as native speakers to analyse island configurations.