A Study Of Mandarin Chinese Children's Perception Of Null Object Construction And VP-Ellipsis

This is a study of child language perception. Ellipsis is an important project for research in linguistics, much literature is available in exploring the issue related with this topic. In Mandarin Chinese, one focus of the researches is on whether the Null Object Construction is a kind of Verb Phrase Ellipsis. As for this controversy, there are two main views: those who supported the VPE analysis of NOC in Mandarin Chinese were represented by Huang (1988), while others who argued that NOC is not derived from VPE were represented by Hoji (1998) and Xu (2003). This study is to test the differences between these two kinds of elliptical structures from the perspectives of child language perception.This paper investigates the differences between the two elliptical constructions from three aspects: the active versus passive contrast, the coordinate versus subordinate contrast as well as the parallel versus nonparallel scenarios in term of adverbial recovery. There are three groups of 36 children at one-year intervals from 4;3 to 6;9 and one control group of 20 adults. The truth-value grammaticality judgment task is used to test their sensitivity to these two elliptical structures. On the basis of analyzing the data, the major findings are summarized as follows:The results of children and adults indicate that the tested subjects can correctly distinguish between the two superficially similar constructions. For the first research question, children know that VPE in passive VP antecedent contexts is grammatically degraded, but NOC is not. They can reject the nonparallel VPE sentences most of the time. As to the second research question, children know that VPE can not occur in the subordinate clauses, but NOC can. About the last research question, we find that children know the differences between VPE and NOC in terms of adverbial recovery, they understand that the recovery is obligatory in the interpretation of VPE completions. The findings of this study have provided new evidence in support of Hoji and Xu's view that NOC is not a kind of VPE.