Mandarin-Speaking Children’s Early Production Of Deictic Verbs Of Motion Lai And Qu

In natural languages, there exist deictic words that link speech with its context. For instance, the demonstratives this and that respectively refer to proximal and distal objects from the speaker’s perspective. As for dynamic events, deictic verbs such as come and go denote opposite moving directions and convey the spatial relations between the speaker, the addressee and the moving entity. Researchers investigate the acquisition of these verbs to explore children’s early semantic knowledge. The Mandarin lai and qu have similar contrastive deictic meaning as their English counterparts come and go. They also have derived senses denoting a change of state. They may combine with a variety of verbs to form resultative verb compounds(RVCs).The present study examines the early production of lai and qu and compares it with the adult utterances of both verbs to explore Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of the deictic contrast and to investigate the impact of input factor. The study also intends to present the development of different verb senses in early child speech and to respond to the controversy over the verbs’ acquisition order. We looked into the naturalistic data of four Mandarin-speaking children(0;10-2;0). Both child and adult utterances of lai and qu are extracted, classified and analyzed within the immediate contexts of their appearance. It is found that children have an awareness of the moving direction, the goal of movement and the point of reference that underlie the verbs’ deictic meaning from the outset. In the children’s speech, there exists an asymmetry between lai and qu. The high productivity of ―V + lai‖ compounds with lai in its resultative sense lies in a sharp contrast with the rarity of ―V + qu‖ compounds and qu is predominantly used as a single verb in its directional sense. The child production and the adult use have similar frequency distribution of the verbs but differ in important ways. In the children’s speech, the senses of lai and qu are less extensive and the type of RVCs with qu is still limited.These findings first manifest that children have established a basic discrimination between lai and qu before age two, which may benefit from the language-specific RVCs. Second, the asymmetric patterns suggest an acquisition order from lai to qu and support the Theory of Markedness. Last, the study indicates the impact of input on the frequency of child verb use, and exhibits the early semantic development in the extension of verb senses and the diversity of verb compounds.