中  華  心  理  學  刊
民93，46卷，2期，129-144

Emanuele Banfi（Dipartimento di Epistemologia e Ermeneutica della Formazione, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Italy）

Abstract

The fact that in the corpora of Chinese learners of Italian as a Second Language, Rel(ative) Cl(ause)s are rare and problematic in nature, gives reason to think that the learners might try to avoid a syntactic structure that is extremely productive in the target language - Italian - both for number of occurrences and for functions. To verify the hypothesis of "avoidance" of RelCls, I investigated the ability of Chinese learners to produce RelCls within syntactic contexts of L2 Italian that obligatorily require the presence of a RelCl. In order to do that, I stimulated the elicitation of RelCls in L2 Italian through a questionnaire that I designed for this specific purpose. Data of that questionnaire are here analyzed and discussed.

Keywords: second language acquisition, syntax, relative clause, Italian as L2