Early Child Language Acquisition Of The Reflexive Ziji In Mandarin Chinese

This dissertation carries out an experimental study of the acquisition of Chinese reflexive ziji by Mandarin speaking children.The dissertation consists of 6 parts:Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction to the idiosyncrasy of Chinese reflexive ziji and reviews major solutions in literatures.The theoretical framework and the relative information of the study are also briefly described.The next 3 chapters mainly deal with the experimental studies.Chapter 2 reports the experiments which aim to test the syntactic knowledge.The result of test 1 shows that children older than 4 have the knowledge of c-command,i.e.they know that ziji or constituents containing ziji must be c-commanded by antecedents.The comparison between children and adults indicates that basically they have the knowledge of c-command.The results of test 2 show that children older than 4 prefer the local antecedent rather than the long-distance one,but the percentage is not convincing enough to support the idea that children know the locality condition.The tests of semantic knowledge in Chapter 3 look into the predicate's influence in choosing the antecedents of Chinese reflexive ziji.In test 3 the semantic influence on the reference of ziji exerted by the lexical properties of the predicates is excluded by using biased verbs and non-biased verbs in the test.The result shows that children indeed prefer local binding after excluding the influences of predicates and children have the knowledge of locality condition.The lexical property of predicates is one of the most significant elements which impact the understanding of ziji.In test 4 the method of picture identification is adopted in testing the condition of animacy.The result indicates that children are sensitive to the requirement that the antecedent of ziji must be animate.They know that the grammatical antecedent must be animate,or they prefer the more animate antecedent between the two candidates.Chapter 4 discusses the acquisition of the pragmatic knowledge.The data from test 5 indicates that the impact of pragmatic knowledge grows with the age of children. Therefore,the acquisition of context knowledge is later than that of the syntactic knowledge.The children's anaphoric and logophoric responses are also compared. The result shows that the logophoric interpretation has emerged on children older than 4,which in turn shows that children at this stage come to acquire pragmatic knowledge.Children older than 4 has begun to show their sensitivity to pragmatic factors in the interpretation of reflexive ziji.Chapter 5 tries to elaborate the theoretical thinking based on the data from the tests. For the study of the reflexive itself,the data from the experimental and longitudinal study suggest that both syntactic and pragmatic factors should be taken into consideration in describing and explaining the properties of reflexive ziji.The non-parameter method has superiority over the principle-parameter one in explaining the order of acquisition.As for the acquisition theory,the tests lend supports to the Maturation Hypothesis and the Theory of Modularity.In early child grammar,there is an absence of functional categories and the principles of Universal Grammar develop with time.The acquisition order of some items can be attributed to the interaction of unbalanced development of different modules such as lexicon,syntax and pragmatic knowledge.Chapter 6 gives a summary to the studies carried out in this dissertation.