The Acquisition Of Chinese Cassifiers By Mandarin-speaking Children

In Mandarin Chinese,a numeral ean't directly co-occur with nouns;it can qualify nouns only by virtue of classifiers.Due to the complexity of classifiers,many scholars have been interested in children's acquisition of classifiers and conducted related studies from many different perspectives,but there are controversies in some aspects.And this thesis aims to add some evidences to this area by adopting elicited tasks to test children's performance on producing classifiers.This thesis includes two studies.The first study focuses on the general acquisition order of different kinds of Mandarin Chinese classifiers and the major characteristics of Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of classifiers together with the factors that contribute to these characteristics.The data adopted in this study were borrowed from Hunan University database,which were collected by a language research group led by Professor Ning Chunyan.And by analyzing 762 participants' Production data,the strong continuity hypothesis is tested.The second study tries to figure out whether or not there is any difference in the acquisition of classifiers by children from northern China and children from southern China and for this purpose,this study analyzed the production data contributed by 97 children from northern China and 108 children from southern China.The production data of northern China come from the database of Tianjin Normal University,which were collected by a research group led by Professor Ning Chunyan,Professor Yang Caimei and some other professors and scholars,and the data from southern China were contributed by children from two kindergartens and a community in Suzhou.The studies reveal that:(1)participants demonstrated a significant better performance for container classifiers than for individual classifiers,collective classifiers and non-individual classifiers,and there was no big difference in terms of producing the latter three types of classifiers;(2)children at their early age have already achieved a sound mastery of the structure Numeral+Classifier(+Noun)despite the limited input,suggesting children are born with the ability to produce such a structure and child language is in essence the same as adult language,which can serve as an evidence for the validity of SCH and the existence of UG;and the existence of the structure Numeral+Noun suggests that children are mainly driven by their innate system instead of imitating others in terms of learning syntax;(3)children from northern China and southern China presented similar performance on producing classifier,which means that geography has almost no effect on children's faculty for acquiring classifiers,for UG entitles human beings with the same faculty for syntax,which is also consistent with SCH.All in all,children at their early age have mastered the structure Numeral+Classifier(+Noun)and geography has almost no effect on children's acquisition of classifiers;complete functional structure is available from the initial state and child language and adult language are same in essence,which proves the validity of SCH.