Acquisition Of Classifier By Mandarin-speaking Children

Although the acquisition of classifiers by children has been the attention of a miraculous number of researchers.Researchers both at home and abroad have done numerous studies about the acquisition order of classifiers by Mandarin-speaking children and have achieved fruitful results.Nevertheless,there is a big difference in the conclusions.The present research aims to figure out the acquisition order of Chinese classifiers so as to provide convenience for future study of the acquisition of classifiers.The research contents include:(1)the acquisition order of classifier by mandarin-speaking children.(2)the main contributing factors of the acquisition order of classifier.The methods of present study include:First,semantic calculation method based on-The Semantic Complex Theory by Clark(1977)and the calculating research for natural language system by Pollard and Biermann(2006)are applied to achieve the acquisition order of classifier.Subsequently,the results of the first step will be examined through the statistics and analysis of The Child Language Data Exchange Systems(CHILDES)which is one of the world's largest children's corpus investigated by professor Zhou Jing through examining the spontaneous language records of children in 7 age groups totally including 140 children aged from 36 months to 72 months.At last,the results of the first and second steps will be compared and analyzed.The results are:The consequences according to the semantic calculation method and statistics are both involved with the acquisition order of classifiers by mandarin-speaking children and they are the same.The final consequence is:animate classifier ? shape-based classifier?function classifier? group classifier?partitive classifier ? temporary classifier ? container classifier.