The (Non)referential Use Of Nominals In The Early Speech Of Mandarin-speaking Children

The present study is to explore the (non)referential use of nominals in early Mandarin child with a particular focus on the correlation between nominal forms and their functions. The longitudinal study was carried out to investigate the acquisition of nominals by two young Mandarin-speaking children before two and a half years old.The paper mainly consists of five chapters.Chapter One gives an introduction. It first introduces the significance of referentiality in human language and cognition. Then previous studies are reviewed on the acquisition of referring expressions with a particular focus on the semantic distinction between specific and nonspecific reference. Two divergent views have been proposed on the issue. Some such as Brown (1973) argues for the availability of the semantic distinction between specific and nonspecific reference on very early stage of English-speaking child language development. However, other researchers (notably Karmiloff-Smith, 1979) argue that French-speaking children do not acquire such a semantic distinction until eight years old. Besides, several studies such as Min (1994) have also been conducted to investigate how young children acquire the Chinese referential system The results of Min's (1994) study support Brown 's (1973) findings.Chapter Two provides the theoretical background of the present study. Some key concepts related to referentiality are first introduced including the semantic concepts of referring expression, specific versus nonspecific and definiteness versus indefiniteness. Then, a detailed description of the characteristics of Chinese referentiality is provided mainly based on Chen Ping's (1987) study. Finally, an overview of the previous studies on the acquisition of language-specific referential systems is presented.Chapter Three concerns the methodology of the present study consisting of subjects, data collection and data coding. Two subjects are investigated with the age range from 1;05 to 2;03 . Based on detailed video contextual information, a set of working criteria are employed for data analysis to judge whether an NP is a predicate or an argument.Chapter Four is the most important part of the thesis. The development of nonreferential predicate nominals and referential NP arguments in the speech of the two subjects are described and analyzed in detail in terms of their internal structures, the order of acquisition and their syntactic positions with respect to verb. In addition, NP arguments used for specific or nonspecific reference are also examined.Based on the findings of the previous chapter, the conclusion of the present study is drawn in the final part, consisting of two points: First, the two Mandarin-speaking children have acquired some aspects of referential and nonreferential uses of nominals on the very early stage. To be specific, the children have the primitive knowledge of the semantic distinction between specific and nonspecific reference earlier (before two and a half years old). Second, the two Mandarin-speaking children have showed some sensitivity to word order in terms of NP types with regard to verb very early although they have not yet acquired the pragmatic distinction between definiteness and indefiniteness.