A LONGITUDINAL ANALYSIS OF THE ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH BY AN ADULT HMONG SPEAKER
Author(s):
Huebner, Thomas George
Format:
Thesis
Degree granted:
Ph.D.
Publisher:
Ann Arbor : University of Hawai'i at Manoa, 1982.
Pages:
1
Language:
English
Abstract:
This study is a longitudinal micro-analysis of the interlanguage of an adult Hmong speaker acquiring English in a natural setting without formal instruction. The data consist of natural, as opposed to elicited, language collected on an average of every three weeks for one year, beginning a few weeks after his arrival in Hawaii. The most apparent changes in the interlanguage are in the linguistic organization of information. Three areas of linguistic variability and change are described within the dynamic paradigm developed by Bailey, Bickerton and others: a morpheme is(a), the article da, and anaphoric reference. Initially, is(a) is used as a topic-comment boundary marker. In the process of discovering the right contexts for the form, the informant first neutralizes the system he had been using by systematically eliminating the form before environments most likely to be asserted information, then systematically re-inserts the form in SE grammatical environments. The form da is initially used to mark noun phrases which have specific referents assumed known to the hearer but which are not topics. In revising his use of da, the informant first neutralizes the previous system by marking virtually all noun phrases with the form, then systematically eliminates it from SE ungrammatical contexts, beginning with the environment which shares neither of two feature values with the SE obligatory contexts for "the". The study also details the acquisition of pronoun forms, the assignment of gender, number and case to those forms, and the replacement of zero anaphora by those forms. With two exceptions, the acquisition of pronoun forms corresponds to the frequency of occasions for use. With regard to the acquisition of gender, number and case, a reduction in the occasions for use of anaphoric reference accompanies a shift in the dominant form. The replacement of zero anaphora with pronoun anaphora is found to occur first in environments in which anaphoric reference is less expected, and later in environments in which anaphoric reference is more expected. The study reveals that the rules governing these aspects of the inter-language grammar are influenced by the structure of discourse. The study proposes five tentative postulates of second language acquisition.