Lecture | Chinese Linguistics in Leiden (ChiLL)
Children's acquisition of Mandarin Chinese verb-copying sentences
- Date
- Wednesday 28 February 2024
- Time
- Serie
- Chinese Linguistics in Leiden (ChiLL)
- Address
-
Lipsius
Cleveringaplaats 1
2311 BD Leiden - Room
- 2.23
Abstract
Mandarin verb-copying sentences are sentences with two non-adjacent phonetic realisations of the same verb, with a Subject-Verbi-Object-Verbi-Postverbal Phrase structure. The post-verbal phrase can be of different kinds, including duration/frequency expressions (e.g., Tā qí-mǎ qí le sān-ge xiǎoshí. He ride-horse ride LE three-CL hours), de-clauses (e.g., Tā qí-mǎ qí dé hěn lèi. He ride-horse ride DE very tired), resultative compounds, etc. For verb-copying sentences, the verb must be copied to satisfy a language-specific constraint that forbids one verb to hold two postverbal complements simultaneously (Huang, 1984).
The challenge for children’s acquisition of verb-copying sentences is that the copying is considered a purely syntactic operation. The verb copy does not provide any additional semantic information, which, based on previous research, can be important for young language learners whose cortical language network (especially the syntax-related dorsal pathway) is not fully developed even until school age. Therefore, when and how children learn Mandarin verb-copying sentences can help us understand more about the development of children’s syntactic compacity. In this talk, I will present the results and findings from some corpus studies and a production experiment. When time permits, I will also introduce the comprehension experiment that is going to be conducted as well as some other potentials for future research.