Pixel International Conferences

This paper looks at the interpretability of a colloquial term in Cantonese, the negative wh-quantifier (‘Neg-whQ’), by adult English-speaking learners. Neg-whQs have the form [mou ‘no’ + wh-word] and bear [Neg] and [Quant:_] features. Instead of a canonical SVO order, a Neg-whQ_obj uniquely manifests an SOV order and is variously interpreted as non-existential ‘nothing’ or existential ‘only a few’.

Either interpretation is obtained depending on the context (e.g. position it appears in, tones or sentence final particles), which hints the common knowledge or old information in the discourse. Learners’ knowledge was investigated by means of a context-based judgement task (CJT). The participants included 21 Cantonese native speakers, 18 intermediate and 20 advanced English-speaking learners of Cantonese. The CJT included six distractors and 12 experimental items (half with designed existential contexts and the other half with non-existential contexts). A selective written context was displayed on a screen followed by five response options (A – E), in which option A represented the crucial Neg-whQ_obj construction type where the existential reading is pushed under the scope of a quantifing sentence particle zaa. Participants made their judgement on a 5-point scale.

The focus of this study is to investigate the role of feature reassembly (Lardiere 2005, 2008, 2009) in second language (L2) acquisition and test whether the functional morphology of Neg-whQs represents a bottleneck (Slabakova 2008). The locus is the specialty of these colloquial terms that have an internal complex morphology [mou, [Ø, wh-word]]. Results suggested that learners, even achieving advanced level, failed to attain the additional existential reading (apart from the standard negative reading) of Neg-whQs. Deficits in ultimate L2 knowledge are concluded to be a result of the lack of one-to-one morphological mapping between a Neg-whQ and its closest counterpart nowhere in learners’ first language. Only a few successful cases from advanced learners demonstrating native-like competence, suggest that it is essential to have experiences in using the second language in a colloquial context.

The results of the experimental work conducted lay insights to future second language teaching. L2 acquisition of Neg-whQs in Cantonese, as a typical colloquial language, by English speakers is problematic, since the relevant facts are neither robustly available from the L2 input, nor are they covered in Cantonese teaching materials. Perhaps, to obtain native-like second language knowledge requires more considerations on how it is talked among native speakers than taught. Future research could usefully follow the recent suggestion by Whong et al. (2014) to bring theoretical L2 research to the classroom, and investigate whether explicit instruction on Neg-whQs could facilitate acquisition of the different interpretations of this form.