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Second Language Acquisition of Reflexives Revisited

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 February 2026

Boping Yuan
Boping Yuan*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
*
Faculty of Oriental Studies, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge CB3 9DA, United Kingdom
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Extract

Quite a few researchers have used data on the acquisition of English reflexives by native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean as evidence for the claim that Universal Grammar (UG) is available to L2 learners and parameter resetting is possible in second language acquisition (SLA; cf. Finer & Broselow 1986, Finer 1990, 1991, Hirakawa 1990, Thomas 1989, 1991). In this discussion note, I will show that the acquisition of English reflexives by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean learners is not a valid test for parameter resetting in SLA, because English reflexives share the same setting as phrasal reflexives in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and it is therefore very likely that no parameter resetting is involved in the acquisition of English reflexives by the learners.

Information

Type
Discussion Note
Information
Language , Volume 70 , Issue 3 , September 1994, pp. 539 - 545
Copyright
Copyright © 1994 by the Linguistic Society of America

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