چکیده:
The present study sought to investigate the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, three different types of obligatory subjects in English, by adult Persian speaking L2 learners of English at different stages of L2 acquisition. A Grammaticality Judgment Test and a Translation Test were designed and developed to elicit the participants' knowledge of obligatory subjects in English.The results revealed that the L2 learners conformed to the natives intheir performance on obligatory referential subjects and obligatory expletive subjects, but they did not conform to the natives in the case of obligatory quasi subjects. The obtained results can be accounted for by the fact that Persian as the L2 learners’ native language accepts referential and expletive subjects in certain structures, but no quasi subjects exist in Persian. This lends support to Smith and Tsimpli (1995) and Hawkins and Chan (1997) in that adult second language learners are not able to modify those functional features not already encoded in the entries of their native language.
خلاصه ماشینی:
com Abstract The present study sought to investigate the acquisition of referential, quasi and expletive subject pronouns, three different types of obligatory subjects in English, by adult Persian speaking L2 learners of English at different stages of L2 acquisition.
Within this model of language acquisition, "Obligatory/null subjects", a property associated with the pro-drop parameter, is one of the most studied topics (Ayoun, 2000; Belletti, Bennati & Sorace, 2007; Boe, 1996; Gurel, 2006; Khalili Sabet, 2006; Liceras, 1989; Platt, 1993; Tsimpli & Roussou, 1991).
As to the obligatory referential and quasi subjects in English, Tsimpli and Roussou's (1991) participants (six intermediate and seven advanced) performed on both judgment and translation tests perfectly, whereas they allowed null expletive subjects in nearly 80% of cases where the suppliance of expletive subjects was necessary to preserve the grammaticality of the constructions.
2 A grammaticality judgment test (GJT) To assess the participants' sensitivity to the obligatoriness of the three types of subject pronouns in English and to get insight into the state of the learners' competence at various stages of L2 acquisition, a 26-item GJT (appendix1) was designed and developed in the present study.
To address the second research question, the participants' performance on the GJT and TT items assessing the knowledge about the obligatoriness of referential subjects in main and embedded clauses is reported in Table 3.
In fact, the advanced learners in this study conformed to the native group in their judgments on the grammatical and ungrammatical structures eliciting their knowledge of English obligatory referential and expletive subject pronouns which are already present in their own native language.