Syntactic transfer in Cantonese-English bilingual development:

a corpus-based study of phrasal verbs

Abstract of B.CogSci Thesis

HO Shuk Kwan, Samantha

This thesis iuvestigates cross-linguistics interaction and transfer in the domain of phrasal verbs in English in Cantonese-English bilingual children by using quantitative and qualitative measures. Two Cantonese-English  bilingual children and two English monolingual children were examined. The relative frequencies of [VERB + NOUN PHRASE + PARTICLE] and [VERB + PARTCILE + NOUN PHRASE] used by the children were observed to examine the differences between bilingual and monolingual children. From the qualitative perspective, structures exclusively found in bilingual children were studied. The results showed that the bilingual children used phrasal verbs in different ways to monolingual children and this could be interpreted as cross-linguistic influence from Cantonese.

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