A Case Study Of The Acquisition Of Chinese Dative/Double Object Constructions

In this case, the utterance of a Chinese child named Yu was recorded. The age of his acquisition data ranged from 2;2 to 3;0. We studied his spontaneous production of the dative construction and the double object construction.In our analysis, the dative construction is defined in a broad sense (Bussmann 1996) including the benefactor-type, (NP1)+gei+NP2+V+NP3, which is in contrast to the recipient-type, (NP1)+V+NP3+gei+NP2. Both structures employ gei to mark the indirect object, but gei appears preverbally in the benefactor-type and postverbally in the recipient-type.We found that the child had produced the benefactor-type dative structure when we started the recording at his age of 2;2. Five months later, at his age of 2;7, he produced the double object construction. And the child produced the benefactor-type dative construction earlier than the double object construction. The examples of the two constructions are listed as in (1) and (2) respectively:(1) Yu gei baba kai men. (2) Gei mama liangge liwu. Yu for dad open door Give mum two souvenir 'Yu will open the door for dad.''(I'll) give mum two souvenirs.'We identified 25 sentences with the benefactor-type dative construction and two sentences with the double object construction. In the data, no recipient-type dative construction is uttered by the child. We assume the benefactor-type dative is not syntactically related to the recipient-type dative, though the latter type implies the benefactor in most cases. Our findings seem to challenge Larson's (1988) account in which the double object construction is transformationally derived from the underlying structure of a recipient-type dative since no recipient-type dative is found in the child's data. We also discuss whether it is plausible to assume that children produce the derived structure earlier than the underlying structure due to the language-specific input, as suggested in Snyder & Stromswold (1997). Moreover, our findings do not support Aoun & Li (1989) either, who propose that the recipient-type dative should be derived from the double object construction, though the former is expected to occur later than the latter. We conclude that the three types of structures are independent of each other in terms of their derivation.