Properties of Spatial Language in Mandarin Chinese and the Acquisition of Localizer Phrases
This study investigates spatial language in Mandarin Chinese from cross-linguistic and child language perspectives.Comparing the spatial language in Mandarin and English reveals some important commonalities and differences:both languages share the same rule in generating spatial phrases(SPs),and their SPs share the same hierarchical structure and involve genitive case;but the two languages differ in the lexicalization of nouns that form SPs,as well as in whether the head at each level of the hierarchical structure has phonetic realization.Moreover,spatial axial part information is lexicalized into prepositions or nouns in English,but in Chinese,it is lexicalized into localizers whose syntactic category is a much-debated topic with evidence suggesting either a noun or a postposition analysis.Based on the cross-linguistic comparison,this study explores the acquisition of localizer phrases(LPs)amongst Mandarin-speaking children(2-6 years old).Our experiments show that children aged 2 generate new LPs not available in their language input by using novel nouns,thus proving the early acquisition of the LP-formation rule as a language universal.However,some 5-year-olds omit the localizer after the common noun in a non-adult-like way and many 6-year-olds are not sensitive to the constraint that proper names of place cannot be followed by li(里)'inside',which suggests that the language-specific lexicalization of Chinese nouns that form LPs gives rise to acquisition difficulty.Furthermore,in an elicited production task,children are found to produce far more LPs in the form of'NP-de-disyllabic localizer'than LPs without de;as de can be followed by a noun instead of a postposition,this pattern confirms the view that disyllabic localizers are represented as nouns in our brain(see Li 1990;Huang et al.2009).It is very likely that native speakers of Chinese perceive the relation between a reference entity and its axial part as that between a possessor and a possessee,lending support to the proposal in Svenonius(2010),that there is a category K(case),manifested by a genitive marker in Chinese and English,in SPs.This study shows the plausibility of confirming a theoretical analysis with evidence from child language.
spatial languagecross-linguistic comparisonacquisition of localizer phrasessyntactic category
万方数据
维普
