Wh-fronting in L2 Chinese

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Chinese wh-elements mostly remain in situ but can be fronted under certain conditions, namely wh-topicalisation and wh-focalisation, which have different syntactic, semantic and discourse properties. I suggest that Chinese wh-fronting isdetermined at the multiple interfaces of syntax-semantics-discourse. Meanwhile, English and Russian wh-elements movedifferently but regardless of all conditions in Chinese. Based on the Interface Hypothesis (IH), Chinese wh-fronting ischallenging for second language speakers (L2ers). However, there is no empirical study using both offline and onlinetasks to investigate it with different L1s (English and Russian) under the framework of IH. This study aims to fill thisresearch gap. Research questions: 1) Will the Chinese wh-fronting involving the multiple interfaces be problematic forL2ers? 2) Will the different L1 transfers and the construction frequency affect L2ers' acquisition? 3) Will L2ers performdifferently in offline and online tasks? An offline acceptability judgement task and an online self-paced reading task willbe used to detect the explicit comprehension and implicit real-time processing of Chinese wh-fronting, respectively.Besides, a corpus-based frequency analysis will be conducted. The contributions of this study are: 1) to reveal theproperties of the wh-fronting in L2 Chinese, 2) to enhance our understanding of L2 interfaces, 3) to investigate theexplicit and implicit L2 knowledge of target structure.