A Study Of Linguistic Variation Of Bilingual Children

Acquisition is a process of systematic variation. The variations of utterance are influenced by situational context, psycholinguistic context and linguistic context. The author studies the systematic variation of bilingual children’s utterances from the perspective of linguistic context. The thesis discusses the impacts of linguistic environments on systematic variation in children’s acquisition through four aspects :( a). the long-term influence of linguistic environments to the variation of the grammatical structures.(b). the sensitivity of morphological infection to the linguistic contexts.(c). the way systematic variation embodied in children’s early acquisition(d).the specific manifestation of children’s systematic variation. These four aspects reveal that systematic variation is along with children’s language growth. Children at age of a year and half can acquire full copula. The number of null variation of copula in this period is decreased as the children’s linguistic competence gets mature. However,they are not able to acquire the usage of contractible copula and the third person singular of the content verbs. Their acquisition needs to go through null variation, full variation and contracted variation. When we study the sensitivity of morphological variation to the linguistic contexts, we find that pronoun contexts more favor target-like variation than noun contexts. The variation of the grammatical structures can reflect the development pattern(simplification, formulaic pattern or overgeneralization etc.) when children are acquiring. These rules of variation in children’s acquisition uncover that children’s acquisition is systematic.