Category or Property?The Semantic Mapping of Adjectives in Child Mandarin
Unlike the semantic mapping of nouns,which is highly universal across languages,the semantic mapping of adjectives seems to exhibit greater cross-linguistic variation:the more frequently the nouns modified by adjectives are dropped in a language,the more likely children will map the adjectives to categories of things,rather than their properties.An analysis of child-directed speech in four Mandarin child language corpora shows that noun dropping is a common phenomenon in the input,which means many nominals that children are exposed to have only adjectives,albeit referential.Using the picture selection task,this study tests 60 Mandarin children on their semantic mapping of adjectives,and finds that initially they tend to map adjectives onto category,rather than property,on a par with the semantic mapping of nouns.It is at a later stage that Mandarin children acquire the association between adjectives and properties.The results indicate the semantic mapping of adjectives in early child language is influenced by the distribution of these words in the input of the specific language.
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
