Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

The acquisition of constraints in child Mandarin

by Shasha An

Since Aristotle, language has been conceived of as a mapping between sentences and their meanings. Assuming that children come biologically equipped with a „Universal Grammar,‟ the task of the language learner is to figure out the mapping relations between sentence structures derived within the computational system and their potential meanings. Within the Generative tradition, this mapping relation is seen to be constrained by core principles of Universal Grammar. These core principles limit children‟s initial hypotheses, either about possible structures or about possible meanings in human languages. By limiting children‟s hypotheses on both form and meaning, the core principles of Universal Grammar enable children to avoid many potential errors that they might otherwise commit. Therefore, children are expected to rapidly converge on the adult grammar, by only adopting linguistic hypotheses that are licensed by Universal Grammar. It is of considerable interest to investigate children‟s knowledge of the linguistic constraints proposed by the theory of Universal Grammar. For one thing, such investigations hold the potential to provide findings that will distinguish the theory of Universal Grammar from alternative approaches to language acquisition, which view language acquisition as largely based on experience, and using general purpose learning mechanisms, rather than being based on pre-existing linguistic knowledge. Because constraints are negative statements, it is difficult to know how they could be acquired in the absence of negative evidence (e.g., corrective feedback), which has been empirically shown to be largely absent from children‟s experience. Therefore, if young children are found to adhere to linguistic constraints, this would constitute circumstantial evidence that children are guided by the kinds of innate linguistic knowledge that are encoded in Universal Grammar. This thesis reports the findings from three studies that investigated 3-5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children‟s acquisition of linguistic constraints. In previous research, it was found that Mandarin-speaking children and adults differed in the interpretation they assigned to the Mandarin disjunction word houzhe „or‟ in simple negative sentences (e.g. Yuehan meiyou dian shousi huozhe yidalimian, „John didn‟t order sushi or pasta‟). Mandarin-speaking adults analyse disjunction as taking scope over negation (OR > NOT). Therefore, adults accept negated disjunctions in three circumstances: e.g., (i) when John only ate pasta, (ii) when John only ate sushi, and (iii) John didn‟t eat either sushi or pasta. Being more conservative than adults, children take negation to have scope over disjunction (NOT > OR). In contrast to adults, then, children only accept negated disjunctions in one circumstance, viz. (iii), when John didn‟t eat either sushi or pasta. The first study in this thesis investigated the interpretations assigned by children and adults to the Mandarin disjunction word huozhe in negative sentences with Verb Phrase Ellipsis (e.g.,…