A Study Of Locatives Acquisition On Mandarin Child

It is locatives that the most common grammatical means to express the category of time and space. The use of locatives is more frequent. The research is divided to two parts of locatives space semantic and locatives time semantic. It analysis the locatives acquisition of one child(1;0—5;0), describes the development of the child’s locatives acquisition, summarizes the acquisition mechanism, and explain it.This paper is divided into seven chapters:Chapter One is the preface:It summarizes the current situation about locatives’study from the preceding locatives’studies and the children locatives’acquisition studies. It elaborates that the motivations and significance of this research, the main theories and the source of data we used.Chapter Two explains the child’s locatives acquisition survey. It analysis and compares child’s locatives acquisition by using diagrams. There are five parts:space locatives and time locatives acquisition survey; the proportion about various types of space and time locatives; the amount on space and time locatives in all ages; compound locatives and simple locatives; child’s locatives acquisition and Mandarin locatives data.Chapter Three explains the child’s main locatives acquisition separately. It describes the child’s locatives(Shang、Xia、Li、Wai、Qian、Hou、Zhong Pang、Zuo You、Dong Xi Nan Bei) acquisition about the (emergence and) development, the combination, the syntactic position and semantic. It makes the statistical analysis and comparative study on the child’s locatives developments.Chapter Four describes the order of the child’s locatives’acquisition and explores the acquisition rule of the child’s locatives. Based on the last chapter analysis, it results, the space locatives’acquisition order:"Li" Type﹥"Shang" Type﹥"Hou" Type﹥"Xia" Type﹥"Qian" Type﹥"Wai" Type﹥"Pang" Type﹥"Zhong" Type﹥"You" Type﹥"Zuo" Type﹥"Dong Xi Nan Bei";the time locatives’acquisition order:"Hou" Type﹥"Shang" Type﹥"Qian" Type﹥"Xia" Type. Then, these acquisition rules are summarized:Semantic acquisition rules:unmarked﹥marked, space﹥time﹥range, specific﹥abstract, inside and outside﹥vertical﹥level; Grammar acquisition rules:compound locatives﹥simple locatives, locatives serve as subject/object﹥locatives serve as attribute/adverbial, pronoun+locatives﹥noun+locatives.Chapter Five explains the reason of the child’s locatives’ acquisition rule. It expresses the rule from the syntactic complexity, semantic difficulty, cognitive perspective, non-linguistic strategies and adult input frequency. The syntactic complexity and semantic difficulty is proportional to children’s acquisition; with the development of cognitive, the quantity of children’s acquisition locatives is more and the semantic is more abstract; the non-linguistic strategies and the adult input frequency have the influence on children’s locatives acquisition.Chapter Six is the discussion. It summarizes the study of this paper and points the merits and the shortcomings of this study. It is the limitations of this study that one tracking case study is lack of universality, expect more case studies example added in and enrich the study of children locatives acquisition in future.