The Research Of Acquisition Of Children's Modal Particle "Ma" And "Ba"

In order to make people better understand how the children acquire modal particles, the paper explores the development of modal particles"ma""ba"among the children before three and a half years old and reveals the process, characteristics and mechanism of children's acquisition of modal particles.The paper is composed of 5 parts. Part 1 introduces the meaning of study about children's acquisition of modal particles, the judging means of modal particles in the paper, the content and aim of the paper, the source of data and the basic condition of children's acquisition of modal particles. Part 2 and part 3 describes the development of modal particles"ma""ba". Part 4 compares the usages and meanings of"ma"with"ba". Modal particles"ma"is only used in interrogative sentence, which expresses interrogative mood or counter-questionable mood, while"ba"can be used in imperative sentence, interrogative sentence and declarative sentence, which expresses imperative mood, supposed mood and declarative mood. The last part reveals the base of cognition and mechanism of children's acquisition of modal particles.It's concluded in the paper that children acquire modal particles"ba"earlier than"ma"which has tight relation to children's cognition and language of input. Children acquire modal particles by means of imitation, syntactic extension and pragmatic inference. Strategies of simplifying, inclination and choosing the latter are used to acquire modal particles for children. The need of communication plays an important role together with the development of cognition in the process of children's acquisition of modal particles.