A Study Of Mandarin-speaking Children’s Interpretation Of Focus Sentences With Two Verbs And Zhi

The study of focus structures has been an important area of linguistic inquiry in the past years. Generally speaking, the interpretation of focus structures involves different levels of linguistic knowledge, such as phonology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. Therefore, children’s interpretation of focus structures could indicate their development of different levels of linguistic knowledge. There are many studies investigating children’s interpretation of focus structures in different languages. However, all of these studies involve only one verb in the corresponding focus structures. There are few studies of children’s interpretation of the focus structure with two different verbs in Mandarin. This thesis tries to make an effort in this.This thesis investigates the interpretation of sentences with focus operator zhi and two different verbs in Mandarin. In the experiment, there are60children (38boys and32girls) at the age of5;00to6;01, of which8children are filled out in data analysis because they gave "yes" responses all the time in the experiment. The children were required to judge the testing sentences to be right or wrong after the story was told by the experimenter according to the pictures. The pictures are visible to all the children. The testing sentences are categorized into three types:zhi v1v2(plus two objects in the story), v1zhi v2and zhi v1v3(plus one object in the story), e.g. zhi dasuan mai (only plan to buy), dasuan zhi mai (plan to only buy), zhi dasuan jie (only plan to borrow). The responses are divided into four and three groups according to different criteria.The results show that the children at the age of5;00to6;01interpret the focus structures in an adult-like manner for the first two sentence types, zhi v1v2and v1zhi v2. Both of them associate the focus operator zhi with the object in the most embedded position and the percentages of the object association are both more than80%. But for the third sentence type, there is a high percentage of both the VP association and the object association in the adults and the children. Different from the adults who focus on the VP association, the children do not have a focus. Further research indicates that there is a trend for the children to approach the adult-like interpretation with their age increasing.All the results show that it is not always the case that people regard the object as the default focus and sometimes the focus may be the VP according to the actual context. There seems to be a focus operator level for the interpretation of the sentences with zhi. When there is an object contrast, the participants would associate zhi with the object primarily. And when there’s no object contrast, they would turn to the VP contrast. If there’s a VP contrast, they choose VP association.