Child Language Acquisition Of Yong Constructions In Mandarin Chinese

Based on a large sample of experiment, this thesis does a research on child acquisition of two sentences of yong construction, i.e. hou mama zhaitao yong lanzi and hou mama yong lanzi zhaitao. We aim to make a valuable observation on children's development of grammar, and help to enrich child language corpus of Mandarin.Deducing from database of seven hundred and ninety two Mandarin-speaking children and seventy three adults, this thesis made an elaborate investigation and description of syntactic awareness of Mandarin-speaking children through observation and comparison of children's distinct output in these two constructions. Meanwhile, syntactic structures of the testing items will be discussed.'Which verbs are the matrix verbs in the testing items, and what are their syntactic structures'and'Is Chinese a configurational language'are the other two research questions of this thesis. Our experiment goes in the way of question elicitation, thus there are diverse output including constructions with ellipsis, word order variance, etc. Our data analysis demonstrates that several patterns are adopted by subjects as replies to the first item, i.e. hou mama zhaitao yong lanzi, hou baba ne, some of which present a regularly decreasing or increasing tendancy with the growth of age. While in the second item, i.e. hou mama yong lanzi zhaitao, hou baba ne, pattern'ye +yong+lanzi+zhaitao'is frequently distributed among subjects and there is no diverse output like that in the first item. With the growth of age, there is a significant decrease in use of pattern'ye+zhaitao'as the reply to both items among children from 2;0 to 6;0. 7-year-old children and adults do not use this pattern. Neither children nor adults make any word order shift of the elicitation questions in replying to them, i.e. they never adopt'ye+yong +lanzi +zhaitao'and'ye+zhaitao+ yong +lanzi'as replies to the first and the second testing item, respectively. Data analyses prove that 4-year-old children seem to have well acquired the two constructions. According to discussion on VP ellipsis in Chinese by Li Yanhui(2005)and Wei Tingyi (2004) as well as arguments on configuarationality of Chinese by Xu Liejiong (2003), we finally get the conclusion: children have been aware of the grammatical mechanism of their mother language from as early as 2 years on. To be specific in this thesis, they can properly interprete grammatical principles that govern interpretation of Chinese elliptical constructions and are sensitive to word order variance mechanism in Chinese. In the meantime, results of our data analyses together with the above theoretical background as well as intuition of adults prompt us to conclude that yong is a verb and is used as the matrix verb in both testing items, and Chinese is configurational language.