The Countability Of Chinese Animate Nouns From The View Of First Language Acquisition

In English,nouns can be divided into count nouns and mass nouns,and such count-mass distinction is encoded in the grammatical system(e.g.,a count noun can be followed by the plural marker-s).However,unlike English,there is no grammatical marker for count-mass distinction in Mandarin Chinese.Instead,all Mandarin nouns are allowed to present in bare form.Owing to this typo-logical feature,the countability of Mandarin nouns has become a hot topic for countability research both at home and abroad.With regards to this issue,two opposite accounts have been generated.One is the semantic account and the other is the syntactic account.According to the semantic account,nouns in Mandarin Chinese can be classified into count nouns and mass nouns just like English nouns based on their semantic referents(Doetjes,1997;Cheng&Sybesma,1998,1999,2005;Cheung,Li&Barner,2010;Liu,2014).In contrast,the syntactic account argues that Mandarin Chinese nouns on their own do not specify the countability.It is the co-occurring classifiers that specify it(Pelletier,1975,1979,2012;Borer,2005;Huang,2009;Huang&Lee,2009;Rothstein,2010;Duan,2011;Zhang,2013;Huang&Ursini,2017;Li,2018).In this study,we intend to conduct an empirical study to investigate Mandarin-speaking children's and adults' interpretation of Mandarin animate nouns(gou 'dog',niu 'cow' and yang 'sheep'),by adopting the Truth Value Judgment Task.The significance of this study is to provide empirical evidence for the adjudication of the controversial issue between the semantic account versus the syntactic account.Two possible factors(morph-syntax and contextual information)were examined in our experiments to see whether they would get involved in the interpretation of Mandarin animate nouns.We conducted three experiments in this study.Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 were designed to investigate the role played by the morph-syntactic factor(the presence of an individual classifier)and the contextual factor in the countability of Mandarin animate nouns.After testing the existence of the substance-denoting reading in bare animate nouns in Experiment 1,Experiment 3 further investigated the property of the attested substance-denoting reading:it is the basic lexical meaning or the coerced meaning due to the coercion function of "the Universal Grinder".We found,in Experiment 1,most of the adults and children assigned the substance-denoting reading to bare animate nouns in the substance-oriented context(without the scenario of "the Universal Grinder")and all the participants exhibited the individual-denoting reading in the individual-oriented context.In Experiment 2,participants predominantly assigned the individual-denoting reading to nouns combined with classifiers in both distinct contexts.In Experiment 3,participants preferred to assign a substance-denoting reading to bare animate nouns in our new substance-oriented context(with the scenario of "the Universal Grinder"),but there is no significant difference between the percentage of the substance-denoting reading in two distinct substance-oriented contexts(Experiment 1 and Experiment 3)Based on the experimental data,we draw two conclusions.Firstly,both contextual information and morph-syntactic factor affect the countability of Mandarin animate nouns but it is the classifier that determines the countability.This supports the syntactic account(Pelletier,1975,1979,2012;Borer,2005;Huang,2009;Huang&Lee,2009;Rothstein,2010;Duan,2011;Zhang,2013;Huang&Ursini,2017;Li,2018).Second,the substance-denoting reading of Mandarin bare animate nouns is their basic lexical meaning as the scenario of "the Universal Grinder" is not indispensable to trigger such kind of reading.This conclusion casts doubt on the view of Cheng,Doetjes and Sybesma(2008)which holds that Mandarin bare animate nouns can never get a substance-denoting reading and the substance-denoting reading of inanimate nouns is the coerced reading based on "the Universal Grinder".