汉语限制焦点“只”的儿童语言习得分析-an analysis of childrens language acquisition with chinese restricted focus.docx

AbstractChildren?s acquisition of restrictive focus adverbs is a hot issue in the language acquisition research. In Chinese, adults tend to associate the pre-subject restrictive focus adverb zhi ?only? with the subject. For example, Zhiyou Mali chi-le xiangjiao ?Only Mary ate a banana? means that except Mary, no one else ate a banana. Whether children and adults have the same understanding of the relationship between the syntactic position of zhi ?only? and the elements it restricts is a problem worth exploring. In this study, two investigations with the Truth Value Judgment Task were conducted to investigate Chinese children?s interpretations of pre-subject zhi ?only? through the comparison between adults and children.Previous studies of children?s acquisition of restrictive focus operator zhi ?only? mainly have yielded two major findings. The first one is that children tend to understand pre-subject zhi ?only? as preverbal zhi ?only?. That is to say, children think sentences like Zhiyou Mali chi-le xiangjiao ?Only Mary ate a banana? has the same meaning as Mali zhi chi-le xiangjiao?Mary only ate a banana?. The other aspect that aroused researchers? interest is that in interpreting ambiguous sentences of preverbal zhi ?only?, children would adopt the semantic subset principle, while adults follow the principle of parsimony. For example, the sentence Xiaonanhai zhi bei-zhe shubao ?The little boy is only carrying a bag?, adults would think it is correct as long as what the little boy is carrying is a bag, no matter whether he is also holding a flower spot or flying a kite, etc. However, children will accept the sentence under the condition that all the activities the little boy is doing is carrying a bag. The present study focuses on the first point. We want to know whether children have VP-focus tendency when interpreting pre-subject zhi and testify whether negation could assist children in reaching the adult-like interpretation of pre-subject zhi mentioned in Zhou