Chinese Children Referred To Complement Structure Acquisition

Verb-complement construction is important in Chinese grammar structure and its formation and development have an impact on the formation of modern Chinese grammar system. In the comparative study with other languages, it is also worthy of attention. In this paper, I try to do research on Chinese children's acquisition of verb-complement construction. I examine twochildren's natural language which is from one year and two months old to four-year-old. I try to analyze the acquisition with theories in cognition, pragmatic, grammaticalization and so on. Children's Acquisition of this phenomenon is a long and arduous process and it needs more than one year to acquire its usage. This construction is not a single structure and it includes seven sub-complements. The prototype of acquisition is result complement and it is the earliest to acquire. The acquisition of the other complements is later than this and the acquisition order is tendency complement, may complement, time and place complement, quantities complement, status complement and extent complement.The semantic emphasis of the complement can effect the acquisition of this phenomenon. I find that the earliest acquisition is the structure with semantically emphasize the recipient and the most frequent usage is the structure which semantically emphasize verb. Because the matching extent is the highest for the structure with semantically emphasize the recipient and the usage frequency is higher for the structure which semantically emphasize verb. Children acquire Verb-complement construction with objection early; however, the objection is always omitted. Chinese is the verb-central language and children can chose many other linguistic structures to express their meanings. So they always omitted objection and it results to the limited instances for usage of Verb-complement construction with objection in children's corpus. To Can-verb-complement, the earliest acquisition is the negative structure like"V不C". The structure like"能VC"which expresses children's willing is used more, while one like"V得C"which expresses impersonal statement is used less. BA construction and the verb overlap also have the relation with verb-complement structure.