| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 英語研究所 === 87 === This thesis aims to examine English- and Japanese-speaking adult learners' acquisition of Subjacency and the Empty Category Principle (ECP) (Chomsky 1981, 1986) in Chinese. The subjects were forty intermediate foreign students of the Mandarin Training Center of National Taiwan Normal University: half were English and half Japanese. In addition, there were twenty native speakers of Chinese in the present study. Two tasks (i.e. a preference task and an ordering task) were designed on the basis of the following phenomena concerning Subjacency and the ECP: wh-island constraints, complex NP constraints, sentential subject constraints, superiority effects, that-trace effects, and subject/object asymmetries.
The results show that, except for the superiority effect, both groups of L2 learners were not significantly influenced by their L1, suggesting that L1 does not play an important role in L2 acquisition. Furthermore, it was found that most of our subjects have reset their L1 to proper L2 values, indicating that Universal Grammar is still available. The results also show that Japanese speakers did not perform significantly better than the English subjects, though Japanese is more similar to Chinese with respect to Subjacency and the ECP. Moreover, it was found that results of the two tasks match quite well; there was no methodology effect. In addition, among those features, our subjects did more poorly on non-superiority, and the native controls rejected island violations more strongly than both groups of the L2 subjects. Finally, it was found that Subjacency is not acquired earlier or latter than the ECP, suggesting that the ECP is equally easy or difficult as Subjacency.
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