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

Abstract

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.

Filler-gap dependencies in bi- and multilingual grammars: Findings, challenges, and unknowns

“…Although this treatment may hold for this particular island, it is unclear if this analysis would hold for all islands. Relatedly, this special issue also contains two articles devoted to the placement and parsing of prepositions in movement constructions (Espírito Santo et al, 2023; Perpiñán and Cardinaletti, 2022), with both sets of authors claiming that, despite defective morphology (missing Pied-Piping or even the obligatory preposition altogether), these structures involve movement and adhere to structural constraints. In a related sense, the contribution of Putnam and Søfteland (2022) is worth mentioning in this context as an example of restructuring wh -morphosyntactic elements encoding modality in the remaining North American Norwegian speakers.…”

“…Another group of L2 speakers whose language does not instantiate overt wh -movement is Chinese. Espírito Santo et al’s (2023) study investigated the acquisition of European Portuguese (EP) relative clauses, in particular prepositional relative clauses, which in EP instantiate wh -movement with preposition pied-piping (the preposition moves along with the relative pronoun). Additionally, oral EP also allows the omission of the obligatory preposition, a strategy termed as Null-Prep (also investigated in Perpiñán and Cardinaletti, 2022) and resumptive pronouns in colloquial EP contexts.…”

“…Taken together, this collection of articles revisits and updates central topics in the literature of GenSLA, making them pertinent also to the discussions of the twenty-first century. Whereas all studies of this collection defend the position that L2 learners are able to restructure their grammars and converge with the target grammar, employing movement strategies and showing island sensitivity by not trying to pose a gap in an illicit position (Aldosari et al, 2022; Covey et al, 2022; Espírito Santo et al, 2023; Kim and Goodall, 2022), not all studies find processing similarities. For instance, Covey et al (2022) found limited predictive processing in Chinese-speaking learners of English.…”