There has been a growing concern that students in Hong Kong have low proficiency levels in English. Ths constitutes a challenge to language planning policy, which aims at providing opportunities for extending knowledge and experience through the acquisition of English grammar. Grammar forms a major component in English language teachng, and mostly has priority over other parts of the language. The acquisition of second language syntax is the focus of ths research. The main aim of the present study is to investigate the development of relative clauses in the interlanguage of native Cantonese learners of English within the framework of Keenan and Comrie's Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy (1977, 1979). The study also seeks to distinguish the features of Cantonese-English interlanguage which may be attributed to language transfer from those which may be considered as universal to second language acquisition. The role of L1 is then examined. The study focuses on the theoretical concepts of language transfer, comparative study of Cantonese and English relative clauses as well as language universals from a typological perspective.
The issues are investigated with a database of syntactic judgements and production by a p u p of Cantonese-speaking students of English as a second language in Hong Kong. A number of features, namely, the use of resumptive pronouns, the retention of the head noun, shft of noun functions, nun-adjacency of .head noun and relative pronoun, preposition strandinddeletion, and avoidance of the use of zero relativizer are found in the data. These features are discussed and it is shown that they are more attributable to universal and developmental factors than to direct L1 transfer. One important finding of the study is that there exists an uncommon feature of retention of the head noun. Its presence is suggestive of lower proficiency levels in the target language.