A Study Of Acquisition Of The Sentence-final Modality System On Early Mandarin Children

This paper investigates the development of children’s Sentence-Final Modality system from the acquisition of the five Sentence-Final Particles"吧，呢，吗，呗，嘛"，by useing the longitudinal natual language of two young Beijing Mandarin speaker, LXY and SYY.The paper is divided into six chapters.Chapter1is the introduction, it presents the significance and the purpose of the research, reviews the related literature about the Modality in children’s language, explains the theory, method and the source of the data of the research, and then outlines the main research object.Chapter2summarizes the present situation of the study of the Modal issue, discusses the related theory and put forward some views, then analyzes the Modal types and the Modal expression means of the Chinese language, for the purpose of lay a theoretical basis to the following analysis and explains of the data.Chapter3is the principal part of this paper. Comprehensive considering the overall trend and individual characteristics, the development of each item and the development of every age stages, we investigation the acquisition time, output frequency and the development situation of the five Particles, and have a preliminary explanation from the children’s cognitive level and the development of the linguistic competence.Chapter4is the deepening of the last chapter, is also very important.We get some tendentiousness characteristics of the acquisition of the Sentence-Final Modality system and have a general idea of it, through the use of the data and laws come from the previous investigation.In order to show the position of the Sentence-Final Modality system in the overall development of the early Mandarin children’s modal system, we also focus on the acquisition of some other expressing means, like the Modal verbs, Modal adverbs, and the Possibility-complements.Chapter5summarizes the contents of this paper, and points out the deficiency of it.The main laws and conclusions we get are as follows:(1)the acquisition sequence of the five Sentence-Final Particles is"吧>呢>吗>呗>嘛",which has positive correlation with the output frequency of the five.(2) in the acquisition of the five and its meanings, the deontic modality is antecedent to the epistemic modality, the uncertainty subjectivity is antecedent to the certainty subjectivity.(3)the modal type children often use are mainly the deontic modality and the epistemic modality, especially the former.(4) the deontic modality combining closely with the imperative sentence, and the epistemic modality combining closely with the interrogative sentence.(5)the Sentence-Final Modality system acquisitions earliset in the Modal system as a whole, the overall acquisition sequence of children’s Modal system may be "the Sentence-Final Modality system>the Verb-after Modality system>the Verb-before Modality system".