The acquisition of Cantonese noun phrases

This dissertation gives an overall picture of the emergence and development of noun phrases in Cantonese-speaking two-year-olds.;This study investigates three major issues related to the acquisition of the Cantonese noun phrase---the age of emergence of the nominal categories, the internal structure of children's noun phrases, and the use of overt (vs. null) subjects.;Findings based on the longitudinal data of four children aged between 1;05 to 2;10 show that among the seven nominal categories (nouns, pronouns, determiners, classifiers, numerals, wh- words and the nominalizer/possessive marker ge3), nouns are the first to be acquired, at the age of around 1;10. Determiners and classifiers are the next to emerge, at around 2;00. Children do not use pronouns productively until a few months after 2;00. As for the remaining three categories, the children use them only sporadically, which suggests that these categories have not been firmly grasped yet.;Around 2;00, children start to combine elements to form longer noun phrases. Three types of noun phrases are identified in this study: [determiner-classifier], [numeral-classifier], and [noun-noun]. By 2;06, the internal structure of children's noun phrases becomes more sophisticated. Two more structure types are found: [determiner-classifier-noun] and [numeral-classifier-noun]. Judging from the development of these structure types, classifiers play a major role in the development of Cantonese noun phrases. Although the children produce as many as 34 different classifiers by 2;10, four classifiers (the locative classifier dou6, the general classifier go3, the animal classifier zek3, and the plural/mass classifier di1) constitute the core of their system. They are the earliest to emerge and are most frequently used by all four children.;Though noun phrase structure diversifies and becomes more sophisticated over time, children often omit subject noun phrases. An average of 69% of the utterances produced by Cantonese-speaking children are without a subject. The rate is similar to that reported in other null-subject languages such as Italian and Korean and is correlated with the length of the verb phrases produced by these children.