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Markedness and the Acquisition of Referential Forms

The Case of Zero Anaphora

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Carmen Muñoz
Carmen Muñoz
Affiliation:
University of Barcelona
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Abstract

This paper is based on a study by Chaudron and Parker (1990) on the effect of discourse markedness and structural markedness on the development of noun phrase use. In the previous study, it was found that zero anaphora, the least marked form on the two counts, did not fulfill the general predictions drawn from the two markedness scales, and no explanation was offered for that phenomenon. The research presented here partially replicates that study but focuses on the use of zero anaphora in written text, distinguishing between pragmatically constrained and syntactically constrained zero anaphora. Our findings are discussed in light of this distinction, and an explanation lying in the interaction among markedness, the L1, and the L2 is proposed.

Type
Replication Study
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 17 , Issue 4 , December 1995 , pp. 517 - 527
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

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