A Comparative Study Of First Language Acquisition Of Dative/Double Object Constructions

The utterance of a Chinese child Momo was recorded from2;2to2;10to study the dative construction (DC), the double object construction (DOC) and ’gei’ verbs in DOC. Bussmann (1996) defined the dative construction in a broad sense, including the benefactor-type DC (NP1+gei+NP2+V+NP3) and the recipient-type DC (NP1+V+NP3+gei+NP2).The major task of this thesis is to study the relationship between DC and DOC, and the sequence of the acquisition of these constructions. With the study of ’gei’ verbs, we aim to find out which type of ’gei’ verbs is the most difficult one for children to acquire, which type of ’gei’ verbs is the earliest one the children acquire. By the comparison between the parental data and children’s data, we try to find if there exists any influence between the parental input and children’s acquisition of the language.We found that:(1) There is no relationship between DOC. the benefactor-type DC and the recipient-type DC;(2) The sequence of the acquisition of these three constructions should be DOCâ†'the benefactor-type DCâ†'the recipient-type DC(3) gei-forbidden verbs (GFB) are the most difficult one in children’s acquisition;(4) In two structures of gei-required verbs (GRV);[V-gei-IO-DO] is acquired earlier than [V-DO-gei-IO];(5) Parental input plays a crucial part in the child language acquisition.