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SUMMARY:Acquiring temporal meanings without tense morphology: the case of 
 L2 Mandarin Chinese - Roumyana Slabakova\, University of Southampton and U
 niversity of Iowa
DTSTART:20140529T150000Z
DTEND:20140529T163000Z
UID:TALK52413@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Theodora Alexopoulou
DESCRIPTION:This presentation reports an experimental study on the second 
 language acquisition of Mandarin temporality. Mandarin Chinese does not ma
 rk past\, present or future with dedicated morphemes while the native Engl
 ish of the learners does. Mandarin uses discourse context\, adverbs and as
 pectual morphemes to signal temporality. Two competing hypotheses were inv
 estigated. One hypothesis predicted that learning a many-to-one form-meani
 ng mapping will be difficult\, especially for learners whose native langua
 ge uses a one-to-one mapping for the same grammatical meaning. Another hyp
 othesis predicts that universal grammatical meanings would be easily acces
 sible to learners. To wit\, learners of Mandarin would use the deictic pat
 tern of marking temporality (Lin 2003\, 2006\, Smith & Erbaugh 2005)\, whi
 ch postulates that bounded events tend to be interpreted as past and unbou
 nded events—as present. Twenty-eight bilingual native speakers\, 25 inte
 rmediate learners and 23 advanced learners of Mandarin with English as the
 ir native language took three different interpretation tests. Learners’ 
 temporal interpretation choices were highly accurate even at intermediate 
 levels of proficiency\, suggesting that obeying the deictic pattern in a s
 econd language is not hard. Pedagogical implications of these findings are
  discussed.\n\nThis talk is presented by the Cambridge Linguistics Forum.
LOCATION:GR06/07\, 9 West Rd (English Faculty)
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