Category And Productivity In The Early Development Of Verb Argument Structures In Chinese

The status of formal grammatical categories in child language has been one of the most debated issues in the field of developmental psycholinguistics. Two kinds of questions have been asked, the first being whether children can be credited with operating with formal categories at the early stages of language development, the second concerning the nature of the process by which children come to possess or to acquire formal categories. The present study attempts to address these two issues on the basis of naturalistic data from two mandarin-speaking children.Usage-based approaches propose that early language learners do not possess the abstract syntactic category of verbs, and their syntactic ability is constructed around specific verbs or frozen word combinations, rather than abstract categories or general rules. Further, it is also claimed that early grammatical knowledge develops in a piecemeal and gradual fashion. The present study critically evaluates usage-based approaches in terms of the three claims.In order to explore whether the verb category is available in early stages of language acquisition, we checked whether early verbs function as arguments to other operators. The results demonstrate that a significant proportion of early verbs of children (more than 45%) occurred as an argument of other operators (negators, modals, aspectual and existential verbs, AND the first verb in VV compounds) contrary to the claims of Tomasello (1992). Such productive use argues for children's ability to use verbs as arguments of higher predicates, and points to the availability rather than the absence of the verb category.To understand whether early syntactic development reflects a gradual and piecemeal process based purely on simple, domain-general cognitive operations (symbolic integration operations), we examined the development of the subjects'multi-word utterances. The results reveal that between 45% to 55% of the sentence frames generated by two subjects involved two or more changes from their prior sentence frames in the same verb chain, or are frames that could not be traced to any previous sentence frames for the verb. Cognitive operations such as substitution, expansion, addition, and coordination can only account for the development of 65% to 80% of two subjects'multi-word utterances. Operations like omission, reordering, as well as substitution of verb phrases are also used by children in constructing their complex utterances. In addition, we found that the first-use verbs occur in first-use frames rather than prior-use frames for about 40-50% of the time. Further, the first-use sentence frames that contain more than one constituent outnumber those that contain just one constituent by a ratio of approximately 2 to 1. This is a further indication that children's early syntax is not a piecemeal development from earlier word combinations.