Mandarin Chinese Children's Acquisition Of Classifiers

Natural language encodes representations of sets and individuals. In English and other Indo-European languages, one cue to individuation is count syntax:words used directly with numerals (e.g., one cat), in singular or plural forms (e.g., a cat, some cats). Many previous studies have argued that classifier languages such as Chinese and Japanese lack syntactic structures equivalent to those found in mass-count languages, and all nouns in these languages are syntactically mass (Allan,1980; Chierchia,1994,1998; Krifka,1995)In recent analyses of Chinese, some scholars argue that the distinction is lexically encoded:count nouns like pingguo 'apple' denote things naturally appearing in discrete, countable entities, while mass nouns like shui 'water' denote amorphous substances (Doetjes 1997, Cheng and Sybesma 1998,1999). Furthermore, the count-mass distinction is also marked in the numeral classifier system, as only count nouns are selected by count classifiers (i.e., individual classifiers) while mass classifiers (non-individual classifiers) are unselective with respect to count or mass nouns. Alternatively, other scholars hold that nouns are cross-linguistically unmarked for either count or mass before being anchored to a dividing functional structure in syntax (Borer 2005).The current study is, first, an empirical test of Cheng and Sybesma's hypothesis, and second, a test of the acquisition of mass and count classifiers by children of Mandarin Chinese. This experiment showed that for children count-classifiers including individual classifiers and group classifiers were mainly associated with an individual or sets of individuals with the preponderant use of the general classifier ge as an exception, and mass classifiers including container classifiers and partitive classifiers were applied to non-individuals. Based on the experiment results, adult Mandarin speakers manifested a clear-cut count-mass distinction, while 2-to 6-year-olds had not fully mastered the distinction. The overuse of general classifier ge was the main cause of the "cross-category" associations for mass-nouns. It revealed that it was easier to use mass-classifiers appropriately than count-classifiers, due to different traits of count-classifiers and mass-classifiers. Therefore, it took longer to acquire specific count-classifiers. In addition, the most difficult point for the children is to figure out what the inherent or permanent properties a certain count-classifier denotes. In the experiment, we found support for Cheng and Sybesma's analysis, but also found that there was a gap between children's comprehension and their production of classifiers. In general, children at various ages show better understanding than production of classifiers.