| Abstrakt: |
Twenty-seven English-speaking learners of Chinese (the experimental groups) and 20 native speakers of Chinese (the control group) participated in a study that investigated second language learners’ knowledge of reconstruction (NP and predicate fronted sentences with ziji ‘self’ in Chinese. Results of a sentence interpretation task indicate that English-speaking learners of Chinese had knowledge of ambiguity of antecedence of ziji inside a moved predicate, and lack of ambiguity of antecedence of ziji inside a moved NP, although such information is not directly available in English. While the experiment produced evidence that they appeared to have access to Universal Grammar, English-speaking learners of Chinese bound ziji in non-movement sentences to an embedded subject, indicating that they mapped the narrower setting of reflexives in English onto a wider parameter setting of ziji in Chinese. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
