Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-t5pn6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T16:01:34.535Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

RELATIVE CLAUSES IN CANTONESE-ENGLISH BILINGUAL CHILDREN: Typological Challenges and Processing Motivations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 April 2007

Virginia Yip  and
Stephen Matthews
Virginia Yip
Affiliation:
Chinese University of Hong Kong
Stephen Matthews
Affiliation:
University of Hong Kong
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Findings from a longitudinal study of bilingual children acquiring Cantonese and English pose a challenge to the noun phrase accessibility hierarchy (NPAH; Keenan & Comrie, 1977), which predicts that object relatives should not be acquired before subject relatives. In the children's Cantonese, object relatives emerged earlier than or simultaneously with subject relatives, and in their English, prenominal relatives based on Cantonese emerged first, with object relatives followed by subject relatives. These findings are discussed in light of findings on the typology and acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) and the underlying processing motivations of the NPAH. Prenominal object relatives in the bilingual children's Cantonese and English have the same word order as main clauses and can be analyzed as internally headed RCs. The reconceptualization of RCs as attributive clauses (Comrie, 1998a, 1998b, 2002) is supported by children's early RCs lacking a strict grammatical relationship between the head noun and the predicate. Furthermore, as observed by Diessel and Tomasello (2000, 2005) for English, bilingual children's earliest RCs consist of isolated noun phrases (NPs). The early object relatives produced by bilingual children are therefore essentially NPs with the linear order of a main clause, resulting in a configuration that is conducive to early production.We thank Yasuhiro Shirai for organizing the workshop on second language acquisition of RCs at Cornell University in January 2006, where this paper was presented, as well as for his valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. We thank all the participants at the workshop and two anonymous SSLA reviewers for their comments. Additional feedback offered by William O'Grady, Salikoko Mufwene, and John Whitman is greatly appreciated and hereby acknowledged. We thank our children for their contributions to this paper and all of the members of our research team who have contributed to this work—in particular, Uta Lam for her technical assistance. This research has been fully supported by the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (project Nos. HKU336/94H, CUHK4002/97H, CUHK4014/02H, and CUHK 4692/05H) and direct grants from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (01/02, 03/04).

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 277 - 300
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Bever, T. G. (1970). The cognitive bases for linguistic structures. In J. R. Hayes (Ed.), Cognition and development of language (pp. 279–362). New York: Wiley.
Brandt, S., Diessel, H., & Tomasello, M. (2006). The acquisition of German relative clauses: A case study. Manuscript submitted for publication.
Chan, A. W.-S. (2003). The development of bei2 dative constructions in early child Cantonese. Unpublished master's thesis, Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Cole, P. (1987). The structure of internally headed relative clauses. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory, 5, 277–302.Google Scholar
Cole, P., Hermon, G., & Tjung, Y. N., (in press). The formation of relative clauses in Jakarta Indonesian. In A. van Engelenhoven & H. Steinhauser (Eds.), Selected studies on Indonesian/Malay linguistics. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka; Leiden: International Institute for Asian Studies.
Comrie, B. (1996). The unity of noun-modifying clauses in Asian languages. In Pan-Asiatic Linguistics: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Languages and Linguistics, January 8–10, 1996 (pp. 1077–1088). Salaya, Thailand: Institute of Language and Culture for Rural Development, Mahidol Univeristy at Salaya.
Comrie, B. (1998a). Rethinking the typology of relative clauses. Language Design, 1, 59–86.Google Scholar
Comrie, B. (1998b). Attributive clauses in Asian languages: Towards an areal typology. In W. Boeder, C. Schroeder, K. Wagner, & W. Wildgen (Eds.), Sprache in Raum und Zeit: In memoriam Johannes Bechert, Band 2 (pp. 51–60). Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
Comrie, B. (2002). Typology and language acquisition: The case of relative clauses. In A. Giacalone Ramat (Ed.), Typology and second language acquisition (pp. 19–37). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dasinger, L. & Toupin, C. (1994). The development of relative clause functions in narratives. In R. Berman & D. Slobin (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: A cross-linguistic developmental study (pp. 457–514). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Diessel, H. & Tomasello, M. (2000). The development of relative clauses in English. Cognitive Linguistics, 11, 131–151.Google Scholar
Diessel, H. & Tomasello, M. (2005). A new look at the acquisition of relative clauses. Language, 81, 882–906.Google Scholar
Dixon, R. W. & Aikhenvald, A. Y. (Eds.). (2002). Word: A cross-linguistic typology. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Döpke, S. (1998). Competing language structures: The acquisition of verb placement by bilingual German-English children. Journal of Child Language, 25, 555–584.Google Scholar
Dryer, M. (1992). The Greenbergian word order correlations. Language, 68, 81–138.Google Scholar
Gass, S. & Ard, J. (1984). Second language acquisition and the ontology of language universals. In W. Rutherford (Ed.), Language universals and second language acquisition (pp. 33–68). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Genesee, F., Nicoladis, E., & Paradis, J. (1995). Language differentiation in early bilingual development. Journal of Child Language, 22, 611–631.Google Scholar
Gibson, E. (1998). Linguistic complexity: Locality of syntactic dependencies. Cognition, 69, 1–76.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (1987). Implicational universals as predictors of language acquisition. Linguistics, 25, 453–473.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (1990). A parsing theory of word order universals. Linguistic Inquiry, 21, 223–262.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (1994). A performance theory of order and constituency. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hawkins, J. A. (1999). Processing complexity and filler-gap dependencies across grammars. Language, 75, 244–285.Google Scholar
Hawkins, J. A. (2004). Efficiency and complexity in grammars. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hermon, G. (2005, June). The acquisition of relative clauses in colloquial Jakarta Indonesian. Paper presented at the Workshop on the Typology, Processing and Acquisition of Relative Clauses, Max Plank Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany.
Hsiao, F. & Gibson, E. (2003). Processing relative clauses in Chinese. Cognition, 90, 3–27.Google Scholar
Hudelot, C. (1980). Qu'est-ce que la complexité syntaxique? L'exemple de la relative. [What is syntactic complexity? The case of the relative clause.] La Linguistique, 16, 5–41.Google Scholar
Hyltenstam, K. (1984). The use of typological markedness conditions as predictors in second language acquisition: The case of pronominal copies in relative clauses. In R. Andersen (Ed.), Second languages: A cross-linguistic perspective (pp. 39–58). Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Jisa, H. & Kern, S. (1998). Relative clauses in French children's narrative texts. Journal of Child Language, 25, 623–652.Google Scholar
Keenan, E. (1985). Relative clauses. In T. Shopen (Ed.), Language typology and syntactic description: Vol. 2. Complex constructions (pp. 141–170). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Keenan, E. & Comrie, B. (1977). Noun phrase accessibility and Universal Grammar. Linguistic Inquiry, 8, 63–99.Google Scholar
Lau, E. (2006). The acquisition of relative clause by Cantonese children: An experimental approach. Unpublished master's thesis, University of Hong Kong.
Lin, C., Fong, S., & Bever, T. (2005). Constructing filler-gap dependencies in Chinese possessor relative clauses. Proceedings of PACLIC 19, the 19th Pacific-Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (pp. 143–154). Taipei: Academia Sinica.
MacWhinney, B. (2000). The CHILDES Project: Tools for analyzing talk (3rd ed.). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Matthews, S. & Yeung, L. (2001). Processing motivations for topicalization in Cantonese. In K. Horie & S. Sato (Eds.), Cognitive-functional linguistics in an East Asian context (pp. 81–102). Tokyo: Kurosio Publishers.
Matthews, S. & Yip, V. (1994). Cantonese: A comprehensive grammar. London: Routledge.
Matthews, S. & Yip, V. (2001). The structure and stratification of relative clauses in contemporary Cantonese. In H. Chappell (Ed.), Sinitic grammar: Synchronic and diachronic perspectives (pp. 266–281). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Matthews, S. & Yip, V. (2002). Relative clauses in early bilingual development: Transfer and universals. In A. Giacalone Ramat (Ed.), Typology and second language acquisition (pp. 39–81). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
McKee, C., McDaniel, D., & Snedeker, J. (1998). Relative clauses children say. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, 27, 573–596.Google Scholar
Packard, J. (2000). The morphology of Chinese: A linguistic and cognitive approach. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Paradis, J. & Genesee, F. (1996). Syntactic acquisition in bilingual children: Autonomous or interdependent? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 18, 1–25.Google Scholar
Schachter, J. (1974). An error in error analysis. Language Learning, 24, 205–214.Google Scholar
Tang, S.-W., Fan, K., Lee, T., Lun, C., Luke, K.-K., Tung, P., et al. (Eds). (2002). Guide to LSHK Cantonese romanization of Chinese characters (2nd ed.). Hong Kong: Linguistic Society of Hong Kong.
Tarallo, F. & Myhill, J. (1983). Interference and natural language in second language acquisition. Language Learning, 33, 55–76.Google Scholar
Tavakolian, S. (1981). The conjoined clause analysis of relative clauses. In S. Tavakolian (Ed.), Language acquisition and linguistic theory (pp. 167–87). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Tomlin, R. (1994). Functional grammars, pedagogical grammars, and communicative language teaching. In T. Odlin (Ed.), Perspectives on pedagogical grammar (pp. 140–178). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Yip, V. & Matthews, S. (1995). I-interlanguage and typology: The case of topic-prominence. In L. Eubank, L. Selinker, & M. Sharwood Smith (Eds.), The current state of interlanguage: Studies in honor of William Rutherford (pp. 17–30). Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Yip, V. & Matthews, S. (2000). Syntactic transfer in a Cantonese-English bilingual child. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 3, 193–207.Google Scholar
Yip, V. & Matthews, S. (2006). Assessing language dominance in bilingual acquisition: A case for mean length of utterance differentials. Language Assessment Quarterly, 3, 97–116.Google Scholar
Yip, V. & Matthews, S. (2007). The bilingual child: Early development and language contact. New York: Cambridge University Press.