Acquisition of null subjects in European Portuguese by Chinese learners: Syntax and Discourse

This paper investigates whether Chinese learners acquire both the syntactic and discourse-pragmatic properties of null subjects in European Portuguese (EP). Twenty-eight Chinese intermediate and advanced learners of EP (two groups of 14 participants), as well as a control group of 14 native speakers of EP, participated in an off-line questionnaire, which aimed to investigate their knowledge on the occurrence of null and overt subjects in EP. The results show that Chinese learners of EP can acquire the syntactic properties of null subjects yet have difficulties in acquiring the discourse-pragmatic properties of the null and overt subjects in the language.