Chinese Reflexive Ziji in Second Language Acquisition1

With over a decade of fruitful Universal Grammar (UG)-based research in second language acquisition (SLA), White (in press) suggests that "...perhaps the time has come to stop asking the broad question: is UG available to second language (L2) learners or not? ... but it is now the turn of a somewhat more detailed focus on the precise nature of the linguistic competence of language learners". The present study contributes to research on the nature of interlanguage grammar of L2 learners by investigating the L2 acquisition of the Chinese long-distance reflexive ziji "self" by English-speaking and French-speaking adults within the Principles-and-Parameters framework (Chomsky, 1981 and subsequently). The major issues addressed are (i) whether L2 learners, based on positive evidence in the language input (utterances that are available to learners), would be able to know that Chinese allows ziji to be long-distance bound; (ii) whether L2 learners would be able to know, after they have acquired the properties of long-distance binding of ziji, that long-distance binding of ziji is not allowed when the potential antecedents do not agree with each other in person or number (known as the blocking effect). The paper is organized as follows. I will first present the theoretical background of the relevant binding properties in Chinese, English and French in Section 1, concentrating on the long-distance reflexive ziji and blocking effects. I will then in Section 2 outline the relationship between linguistic theory and language acquisition by providing an overview of the studies on the L1 and L2 acquisition of ziji. In Section 3, I will report the details of my experiment. In the last section I will discuss the results and their implications.