Acquisition of Relative Clauses in Cantonese: A Multi-Factorial Analysis

Abstract

This dissertation explores the acquisition of Cantonese relative clauses by examining the effects of three factors (the grammatical relation of the relative clause head noun, NP animacy, and the presence of resumptive pronouns) on Cantonese children’s production and comprehension. A prevailing subject preference is observed in both comprehension and production, supporting the hypothesis of a universal subject preference. Yet, the study on the effect of grammatical relations reveals that children’s acquisition is not only determined by factors that underlie a universal relative clause processing mechanism, but also by some general learning strategies with respect to the characteristics of the relative clause construction of the particular language. It suggests that topicality of subjects make the subject NP more prominent and more available for relativization; and because of the peculiar relative clause construction in Cantonese, children make use of the word order resemblance to construct and process their relative clauses. The effect of animacy is mainly observed in contrastive animacy configurations. The relative ease of relative clauses with an animate subject - inanimate object (AI) configuration comes from children’s strong preference for such animacy configuration; and their strong dispreference for the reverse inanimate subject – animate object (IA) configuration causes children to often respond with a conversion to the preferred AI configuration. Resumptive pronouns do not play a critical role in children’s acquisition, and the only effect observed seems to be rendering the relative clause structure more explicit, reducing ambiguity and mitigating certain errors in comprehension.