|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
Goad and White argued that the prosodic structure required for the representation of English articles is a free clitic, which is a bound element joined directly to the level of the phonological phrase. Not all languages have the prosodic structure for free clitics. Instead, they may have the prosodic structures for affixal clitics (adjuncts to phonological words) and/or internal clitics (incorporated into phonological words). As a consequence, those learners whose first language lacks the structure for free clitics will encounter problems in the acquisition of English articles. In other words, they will have difficulty in prosodically representing articles in spoken production since there are no prosodic structures available in their L1 to accommodate articles in the L2.
Syntactic Mismatch
A mismatch in syntactic structures may also be a source of difficulties. Language differences in topic and subject prominence have been argued to play a role in the acquisition of English articles. In linguistics, the topic (or theme) represents what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme) refers to what is being said about the topic (see Li & Thompson, 1981). Topic or theme generally precedes comment or rheme. In more topic-prominent languages such as Chinese and Korean, the topic-comment or theme-rheme organization of a sentence is predominant over the subject-object organization of a sentence. In other words, once a noun is introduced into the discourse in the post-verbal, comment/rheme position, its existence is established when it moves to the pre-verbal, topic/theme position (see Jung, 2004). Thus, topic position is in a way already semantically marked as definite. As reported in Robertson (2000), L2 learners tend to omit more articles in topic positions if their L1 is a topic-prominent language.
Semantic Mismatch
If the L1 has an article system in place, there is a strong possibility of some kind of mismatch in how the two article systems divide the labor