The Acquisition of English Passives by Cantonese ESL Learners

Download or read book The Acquisition of English Passives by Cantonese ESL Learners written by Pui-Kwan So and published by Open Dissertation Press. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation, "The Acquisition of English Passives by Cantonese ESL Learners" by Pui-kwan, So, 蘇佩君, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Abstract This paper examines Hong Kong Cantonese ESL learners who always find difficulties and make mistakes in the acquisition of English passives. Since passivization has complex structures across different languages, English passives and Cantonese passives do not undergo the same syntactic operation. The current paper provides background information about the contrastive approach in SLA research, rules of forming English passives and types of passives in Cantonese. With a research design of a grammaticality judgment test, Cantonese ESL learners' sensitivity to different passive constructions related to NP-movement and thematic roles is explored. Learners' competence in judging ergative or middle constructions is also investigated. The results suggest that Cantonese ESL learners experience difficulties in the expletive IT, thematic roles except Agent and the middle constructions. i DOI: 10.5353/th_b3157177 Subjects: English language - Voice - Study and teaching (Secondary) - Cantonese speakers English language - Voice - Study and teaching (Secondary) - China - Hong Kong Second language acquisition