The Acquisition Of Focus Particles

Focus is a classical subject which involves phonology, semantics, syntax and pragmatics. The studies on focus have aroused a deep interest among both functional and formal linguists. Researchers abroad and in China who work in different fields have proposed their own viewpoints on focus covering the following fundamental aspects:the concept of focus, its classification and the concept of focus structure. By far, the research on the acquisition of focus particles has attracted increasing attention among many scholars and there has emerged a considerable literature on learners’comprehension of restrictive focus particles in the first as well as second language acquisition.Although some fruits have been achieved, the exploration on this issue in language acquisition still needs further improvements. First of all, linguists hold different conclusions on learners’interpretation of the restrictive focus particles in the initial stage during language acquisition. Some linguists hold that learners tend to fail to use syntactic information to determine the scope of the particle while others think that learners make inconsistent judgments by totally failing to attend to the focus particle. No agreement has been reached yet on this issue. Secondly, most of the previous research focuses on the acquisition of focus particles in the native languages while just a few studies touch upon the second languag acquisition in respect of this issue. With regard to the language phenomenon, similarities and differences between the first language and the second language acquisition are unclear at present. Thirdly, in terms of the previous experimental investigations, some of them don’t take into consideration children’s longitudinal language development about this linguistic knowledge, under which circumstances we are not capable of observing children’s language acquisition and development at different ages. Therefore, more detailed investigations should be carried out concerning learners’ language acquisition of restrictive focus particles.Based on the related findings of the previous research, the present study examines Mandarin-speaking learners’acquisition of Chinese zhi(you) and English only, aiming to uncover the differences between children’s and adults’grammar as well as the relationship between the L1and L2acquisition. The present investigation is an empirical study which adopts the Sentence-Picture Verification Task.453-6-year-old children from the kindergarten in Beijing Anzhen Center and75learners aged6to11from Yuzhong Primary School participate in the tests, all of whom are divided into different age groups with different tasks. In addition,15undergraduates majoring in English and15English native speakers from Anyang Normal University are tested as the control group. Finally, the study calculates and analyzes the data collected from all subjects by adopting the analysis of variance (ANOVA) by means of PAS W Statistics18.0.The results of the investigation indicate the following findings. First, different from adults who use knowledge about focus, Mandarin-speaking children at their early stage of language acquisition usually fail to take account of zhi(you) thus ignoring information about the alternative set when interpreting sentences with the restrictive focus particle. Consequently, they have the tendency to interpret sentences containing zhi(you) as having the same meaning as the counterparts without it. However, older children at around the age of8are well sensitive to the restrictive focus particle and can make consistent judgments like adults. Second, when the Chinese elementary school learners evaluate sentences with only during the second language acquisition, they produce inconsistent responses mainly by neglecting the focus particle only. On the other hand, learners aged10to11are able to access the adult-like interpretation. Third, with regard to the issue of learnability, young learners prefer the subset reading according to the Semantic Subset Principle whereas adults tend to choose the superset reading depending on the Principle of Parsimony when dealing with ambiguous sentences that contain zhi(you) or only.Based on the related linguistic theory, the study attempts to probe into the essential property of focus and learners’acquisition of the restrictive focus particles as well as the relationship between the first language and the second language acquisition. Meanwhile, the present investigation further confirms the prediction of learnability, which deepens our understanding of language development.