| The research on early syntactic development has focused on whether children's grammatical knowledge is usage-based or rule-governed. Tomasello (1992, 2000, 2003) argues for a usage-based approach, which claims that children's early grammatical competence is organized around specific items, especially verbs. Under this approach, early sentences are constructed either by imitative learning from adult input or with one simple symbolic integration operation from previously mastered structures. To address this issue, we examine the early BA sentences of a Mandarin-speaking child (aged 19-29 months) by looking at naturalistic observation data obtained in biweekly to weekly audio- and video-taped sessions. The BA construction, which has a typical form of "NP1-BA-NP2-Verb-Complement" in adult Mandarin, involves a word order different from the canonical SVO order in Mandarin and requires a complex verb form. These properties render acquisition a difficult task. The analysis of our data shows that BA sentences appear in 23 months. Before that, with only one exception, the child constantly maps Themes of transitive verbs to the postverbal position. The child's early BA sentences are generally error free and all involve preposed Themes and verb complements. This shows that she is sensitive to the syntactic and semantic properties of this construction. It is also found that about half of the child's BA sentences cannot have been imitatively learnt from adult models, and the majority of them are not likely to be derived from previous schemas with one small addition or modification. Our findings thus suggest that the cognitive skills of imitative learning and symbolic integration are not able to account for the development of early BA sentences in Mandarin. It is also revealed that BA in child Mandarin is most likely to be a functor but not a preposition or a case marker, and the occurrence of BA sentences seems to be related to children's knowledge of NP movement in some way.
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