Uneven reassembly of tense, telicity and discourse features in L2 acquisition of the Chinese shì … de cleft construction by adult English speakers

This article reports an empirical study investigating L2 acquisition of the Mandarin Chinese shì … de cleft construction by adult English-speaking learners within the framework of the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009). A Sentence Completion task, an interpretation task, two Acceptability Judgement tasks, and a felicity ranking task were administered to learners with intermediate and advanced Chinese proficiency (n = 76). The results reveal an initial mapping between the target Chinese structure and the English it-cleft construction. The relevant tense, telicity and discourse features are added in an uneven feature-by-feature manner in the subsequent feature reassembly. It is proposed that feature reassembly tasks involving cross-domain operations (e.g. from prosody to syntax) are more complicated and more difficult to accomplish than those taking place within the same linguistic domain.