The Development of the Verb Category · and her colleagues have analyzed how verbs cooccur with...
Transcript of The Development of the Verb Category · and her colleagues have analyzed how verbs cooccur with...
The Development of the Verb Category and Verb Argument Structures in Mandarin-speaking Children
before two years of age
Ling XIAO[1], Xin CAI[1] and Thomas Hun-tak LEE[2,1]
[1] INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE, HUNAN UNIVERSITY
[2] LANGUAGE ACQUISITION LAB, CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
1. Theoretical background
A number of usage-based studies by Tomasello and his colleagues have
argued against the existence of the verb as a syntactic category in the early
grammatical development of children, viewing children's multi-word
combinations as instances of item-based constructions (Tomasello 1992, 1999,
2000, 2003; Lieven, Pine and Barnes 1992, Lieven, Pine and Baldwin 1997).
The alleged absence of the verb category has been supported by evidence
showing the paucity of verbs serving as arguments of other operators in
multi-verb sentences. Tomasello (1992: 251) argues that paradigmatic classes
are defined according to syntagmatic criteria. Therefore, nouns can form a
category once they become arguments of verbs; however, verb-like elements
may not form a category unless they themselves become arguments of higher
predicates such as verbs in complementation structures. Since such complex
structures are not productive in early word combinations, as shown in the
longitudinal study of Tomasello (1992), the verb category is said to be absent
Ling Xiao, Cai, Xin and Lee, Thomas Hun-tak. 2006. The development of the verb category and verb argument structures before two years of age. In Proceedings of the Seventh Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, ed. Yukio Otsu, 299-322. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.
before two years of age.
These scholars have also argued against early availability of the verb
category in language acquisition by showing that different verbs have
non-overlapping cooccurrence patterns and lexical specificity effects. Lieven
and her colleagues have analyzed how verbs cooccur with inflectional endings
and auxiliary verbs in English-speaking children aged between 1 year 3 months
and 2 year 7 months (Pine, Lieven and Rowland 1998). They report a low
degree of overlap in the verbs which inflectional endings attach to, and in the
verbs which auxiliary verbs combine with. This raises the possibility that
inflectional endings are attached to specific verbs rather than to an abstract
category. Lexical specificity effects are said to support the view that children at
this stage are operating with limited scope patterns defined by frequency
distributions rather than an abstract verb category. This view is also supported
by studies showing that children between two and three years of age produce
different inflected forms of a verb (different forms of the verb go) at different
proportional frequencies, which vary according to the syntactic contexts they
occur in (Theakston, Lieven, Pine and Rowland 2002).
Besides arguing against the availability of syntactic categories, usage-based
psycholinguists have also advocated the view that early syntactic development is
gradual and piecemeal. Children's sentences at a given point evolve in minimal
steps from earlier sentences with the same verb by means of domain-general
operations such as substitution, expansion, addition, and coordination1. Based on
data from his daughter for the period 18 to 20 months, Tomasello (1992: 236-7)
reports that 92% of the first 271 three-or-more-word combinations of the child
involved only a single simple change from previous sentences with the same
verb. In particular, as a consequence of this piecemeal development, reordering
of elements in a sentence is considered to be a rare operation.
The above usage-based studies are difficult to reconcile with a rich set of
studies documenting the emergence of inflectional and complementizer
categories, as well as the correlation of finiteness with word order, in children
before two years of age (Whitman, Lee and Lust 1991; Deprez and Pierce 1993,
Poeppel and Wexler 1993; Wexler 1993, 1998). These studies are also at odds
with other studies showing young children's sensitivity to abstract principles of
Universal Grammar (Otsu 1981; Crain and Nakayama 1987, Crain 1991); if
children did not have knowledge of major syntactic categories by two years of age,
attainment of knowledge of structure dependence or island conditions at three or
four years of age would be a mystery. In addition, the usage-based accounts
conflict with recent studies showing the robustness of distributional regularities of
grammatical categories available in the language input to children. As shown by
Mintz, Newport and Bever (1995, 2002) and Mintz (2003), groups of words
identified by frequent frames based on neighboring words (one word to the left
and one word to the right of the target word) correspond well to the word classes
defined by adult linguistic criteria. If distributional bootstrapping is deemed a
plausible strategy for mapping words to syntactic categories such as nouns and
verbs, one should not expect the acquisition of the verb category to be a
protracted process.
2. Aims of the study In this paper, we critically evaluate the usage-based view by examining the
longitudinal grammatical development of two children growing up in Changsha,
Hunan, acquiring a southern variety of Mandarin as their native language, from
one to two years of age. Like Beijing Mandarin, the southern Mandarin spoken in
Changsha is impoverished in morphology, and syntactic categories are defined
almost exclusively by means of syntactic distribution rather than morphological
marking.
First, we demonstrate that the verb category exists by showing that
distributional bootstrapping is a viable mechanism for tuning in to the
distributions of major syntactic categories in the target language such as nouns,
verbs, and adjectives. Following the method of Mintz (2003), we analyzed the
frequent frames of the adult input to the children to see if there was a good fit
between the intervening words identified by frequent frames and adult word
classes as defined by linguistic criteria. We then examined the frequent frames
and the intervening words of such frames in child production, and compare them
to those in the adult input to see whether the two sets of frames and intervening
words matched each other.
Second, we show that a significant proportion of early verbs of children
serve as arguments to other operators, contrary to the claims of Tomasello. We
analyzed the multi-verb utterances of the children that occurred in negative and
interrogative contexts, as well as utterances in which verbs served as
complements to modal verbs, aspectual verbs or matrix verbs. Utterances in
which verbs appeared as the second verb of [V V] compounds were also
identified.
Finally, we show that early syntactic acquisition is not a gradual, piecemeal
process with a detailed analysis of the verb-argument structures of the two
subjects. We traced the use of each verb used by the children and the sentence
frames it occurred from one session to the next, to determine for each session
how many verbs appeared for the first time, how many sentence frames were
introduced for the first time, and how many first-use verbs occurred in first-use
frames.
3. Data for analysis The data consisted of 20 sessions each of hourly audio- and audio-visual
recordings for two children growing up in Changsha, acquiring a variety of
Southern Mandarin and exposed to other Hunan dialects. The children were
observed for more than a year beginning from around 10 months of age. The
data used for distributional analysis covered the period 01;02;22 to 02;00;26 for
one child AJR, and 01;03;14 to 02;00;19 for the other child, LSY. Since children
did not enter the two word stage until 18 months old, the data used for verb
argument analysis began from one and a half and ended at around 2 years old,
with 13 sessions of data for AJR and 11 sessions for LSY.
4. Method and results on distributional analysis
4.1 Method for distributional analysis Following Mintz (2003), we extracted every sequence of three adjoining
words from each utterance. In each such sequence, the intervening word was the
target and the neighboring words were considered as the frame, i.e. the linguistic
environment of the target word. Here, we carried out two types of frame analysis.
One type of frame analysis excluded initial and final utterance boundaries from
frames, as in Mintz (2003). In addition, different from Mintz (2003), we did an
analysis of frames which included utterance-initial and utterance-final
boundaries. Before frame analysis was carried out, word boundary symbols were
inserted into utterances. The criteria for a Chinese word were based on the
proposals of Zhu (1982), Lü (1980) and Xia (2002), which included criteria such
as minimal free form, expandability, versatility and compositionality.
Our frequent frame analysis was carried out on the adult input to the two
subjects for utterances with two or more words. The frequency of each frame, as
well as that of each intervening word in the frames, was recorded. In this
analysis, a subset of all frames whose frequency reached 15 or more were
considered as frequent frames. Then we extended the frequent frame analyses to
the speech of the two children at two years of age, for utterances containing two
or more words. With respect to frames in children’s production, those whose
frequency reached 3 or more were considered as frequent frames since the
number of children's utterances was far less than that of the adults.
In order to assess how well frequent frames identify syntactic categories, two
quantitative measures of categorization were used. One is an accuracy score
calculated for each frequent frame. The intervening words of each frequent
frame were assigned category labels according to adult linguistic criteria. To
compute the accuracy score for each frame, all possible pairs of words in the
category were compared. Each pair was classified as a hit or false alarm. A hit
was recorded when two words were from the same syntactic category. And a
false alarm was recorded when two items were from different syntactic
categories. Accuracy measures the proportions of hits to the number of hits plus
false alarms, maximum accuracy being 1. In addition, a prominence score was
calculated for each frequent frame. For each cluster of intervening words
identified by a frequent frame, the category label that occurred most frequently,
in terms of both type and token, was taken as the prominent category of the
frame. Prominence measures the ratio of the number of words in the cluster that
belong to the prominent category to the number of words in the cluster. This
measure indicates the degree to which a salient category was identified by a
frequent frame. Next, the frequent frames in the adult input were compared to
those of children’s production with respect to the number and percentage of
overlapping frames, the number and percentage of overlapping intervening
words, and accuracy and prominence scores.
4.2 Results on distributional analysis Our data show that distributional analysis based on frequent frames of
neighboring words can pick out the distributional properties of major word
classes in Chinese, as seen from accuracy and prominence measures.
Table 1. Number of utterances, words and frames in the adult input Number of frames Subject Number of
utterances Number of words (type (token))
Frames (w_w)
Frames (w_w, #_w and w_#)
AJR 12734 2303 (46646) 11197 13281 LSY 9403 1965 (38369) 9842 11547
Table 2. Number of frequent frames and intervening words
in frequent frames in the adult input Number of frequent frames Number of intervening words
(type (token)) Subject
Frames(w_w)
Frames (w_w, #_w and w_#)
Frames (w_w)
Frames (w_w, #_w and w_#)
AJR 128 390 560 (4015) 1432 (20163) LSY 131 311 512 (4370) 1335 (15889)
Table 1 gives the statistics for the number of utterances, words and frames in
the frame analysis of the adult input. Table 2 shows the number of frequent
frames and intervening words. In the frequent frame analysis excluding
utterance boundaries, 128 and 131 frequent frames were found in the adult input
to the two children, containing 560 and 512 intervening words respectively.
These frequent frames constituted less than 3% of all frames, and covered up to
23% to 26% of all types of words in each dataset. In the frame analysis
including utterance boundaries, 390 and 311 frequent frames were found for the
children taking up 2.9% and 2.7% of all frame types in each dataset. The
intervening words identified by the frequent frames contained 1432 and 1335
words for the two subjects, covering 62% and 68% of all types of words in the
data. These figures suggest that frequent frames could be an effective cue for
syntactic category information, since a relatively small number of
high-frequency linguistic environments (less than 3% of the frames) will permit
the learner to categorize about one-quarter of the words in the input.
Turning to the accuracy and prominence scores of the frequent frames in the
adult input to the children, as can be seen from Table 3, if utterance boundaries
were excluded from frames, the mean accuracy scores ranged from 0.68 to 0.71
for frequent frames overall, and ranged from 0.74 to 0.83 for frequent frames
that picked out verbs and adjectives as prominent categories. With respect to
mean prominence scores, these ranged from 0.7 to 0.75 for frequent frames
overall and from 0.86 to 0.91 for frequent frames whose prominent categories
were verbs and adjectives. These values on the whole reflect a good fit between
clusters of words identified by frequent frames and word classes based on
linguistic criteria. The accuracy and prominence scores were generally reduced
for the frame analysis which included utterance boundaries, reflecting
inadequacies in relying on distributional analysis alone. The mean accuracy
scores ranged from 0.51 to 0.53 for frequent frames overall, and ranged from
0.61 to 0.82 for frequent frames that identified verbs and adjectives as prominent
categories. As regards mean prominence scores, these varied between 0.6 and
0.65 for frequent frames overall and between 0.73 and 0.91 for frequent frames
that had verbs and adjectives as prominent categories.
With respect to the results on frequent frames in the children's production,
Table 4 shows that the mean accuracy scores ranged from 0.57 to 0.73 for
frequent frames overall, and varied between 0.66 and 1 for the frequent frames
whose prominent categories were verbs and adjectives. The mean prominence
scores ranged from 0.64 to 0.8 for frequent frames taken as a whole, and ranged
from 0.75 to 1 for the frequent frames which yielded verbs and adjectives as
prominent categories. The results show individual variation between the two
children, as the mean accuracy and prominence scores revealed a better
correspondence between the word clusters identified by frequent frames and
those defined by adult criteria for AJR than for LSY.
Table 3. Accuracy and prominence score of frequent frames in the adult input (types)
Mean accuracy score of all frequent
frames
Mean prominence score of all frequent
frames
Mean accuracy score of frequent frames
yielding verb and adjective
Mean prominence score of frequent
frames yielding verb and adjective
Subject
Frame (w_w)
Frame (w_w, #_w and w_#)
Frame (w_w)
Frame (w_w, #_w and w_#)
Prominent category
yielded by frequent frames
Frame (w_w)
Frame (w_w, #_w and w_#)
Frame (w_w)
Frame (w_w, #_w and w_#)
Verb 0.74 0.73 0.91 0.76AJR
0.71 0.51 0.75 0.65 Adjective 0.77 0.63 0.88 0.73
Verb 0.83 0.61 0.86 0.75LSY
0.68 0.53 0.70 0.60Adjective 0.82 0.82 0.89 0.91
Table 4. Accuracy score and prominence score of frequent frames in children’s production (types)
Subject Mean accuracy score of all
frequent frames
Mean prominence score of all
frequent frames
Prominent category yielded by frequent
frames
Mean accuracy score of frequent frames yielding
verb and adjective
Mean prominence score of frequent
frames yielding verb and adjective
Verb 0.82 0.91AJR
0.73 0.8Adjective 0.66 0.75
Verb 0.74 0.86LSY
0.57 0.64Adjective 1 1
Examples of the frequent frames in the adult input are given in Table 5 and
Table 6, which give the intervening words for the frequent frames whose
prominent categories are verbs and adjectives, for the analysis in which sentence
boundaries were excluded.
Table 5. Examples of frequent frames in the adult input to AJR (w_w)
Frequent frames
Intervening words (number of tokens) Prominent category of intervening words
bu_le “not_particle”
yao “want to have”(8),wan “play(5), qu “go” (3), tiaowu “dance”(3), xi “wash”(3), tiao “jump”(3), hua “draw”(2), jide “remember”(2), jiang “speak”(2), jiao “call”(2), kai “open”(2), yun “dizzy”(2), ying “win”(2), ren “recognize”(1), shua “wash”(1), ting “listen”(1), tou “cast”(1), xihan “like”(1), zhong “hit target”(1), zhuan “turn” (1), zuo “sit”(1), guang “take charge of “(1), hao “good” (1), he “drink”(1), kan “look”(1), lai “come”(1).
verb
hao_de “very_particle”
zang “dirty”(22), ku “cool”(8), leng “cold”(7), piaoliang “beautiful”(7), guai “well behave”(3), duo “much”(3), kuai “fast”(3), yonggan “brave”(2), yuan “far”(2), kexi “pity” (2), lihai “shrewd”(2), shen “deep”(2), ying “hard”(1), gan “dry”(1), gaoxing “happy”(1), hei “black”(1), jiu “for a long time”(1), le “particle”(1), nengan “crackerjack”(1), nuli “work-hard”(1), nuanhuo “warm”(1), pa “afraid”(1), qingliang “cool”(1), re “hot” (1), tian “sweet”(1), zhuang “contain”(1)
adjective
To obtain a qualitative understanding of the relationship between the
frequent frames and intervening words of the adult input and those of the
children's production, we identified the frequent frames that occurred in both the
adult input and the child speech.
Table 6. Examples of frequent frames in the adult input to LSY (w_w)
Frequent frames Intervening words (number of tokens) Prominent category of intervening words
zai_shenme “be_what”
gan “do” (31), chi “eat” (5), he “drink” (2), hua “draw” (2), chang “sing” (1), kai “open” (1), kan “look” (1), shuo “talk” (1), tuo “drag” (1), wan “play” (1), xia “come down” (1), zhao “look for” (1).
verb
tai_le “too_particle”
xiao “small” (6), meng “impetuous” (2), cao “noisy” (2), chang “long” (1), da “big” (1), tiaopi “naughty” (1), duan “short” (1), duo “much” (1), gao “high” (1), hao “good” (1), kuai “fast” (1), lihai “shrewd” (1), pi “naughty” (1), xinku “tired” (1), youmo “humorous” (1),
adjective
For each overlapping frequent frame, we observed the intervening words
that occurred in both the adult input and the child production. The percentage of
the overlapping frequent frames in relation to the total number of frequent
frames in the children's speech was calculated. Similarly, the percentage of
intervening words in relation to the total number of intervening words in the
child production was calculated. It was found that between 81 and 85 frequent
frames of the two children at two years of age overlapped with the frequent
frames of the adult input covering the period prior to two years of age,
constituting 83-84% of the frequent frames in the children's production. When
the overlapping intervening words were considered, it was found that the mean
percentage of overlapping intervening words in relation to the total number of
intervening words in a frequent frame in the children's production was 67% for
one child and 61% for the other.
The above figures suggest a close fit between the frequent frames of the
children and those of the adults, pointing to the success of children's using
distributional information in the adult input to acquire the distributional
properties of syntactic categories in the target language. On the other hand, the
data also show that the children are acquiring not just the frequent frames and
their intervening words as purely probabilistic relations, since on average only
about two thirds of the intervening words in a frequent frame of the child
production come from the adult input. This can be taken as an indication that the
children are not just remembering lexically-based patterns, but have extended
the prominent categories identified by distributional properties to other lexical
items than those that appeared in the adult frequent frames. In the context of our
discussion, children have established the formal categories of verbs and
adjectives on the basis of input.
5. Method and results for verb-argument development
5.1 Method for analyzing verb-argument structures In this section, we examine the development of the verb category and the
verb argument structure of the two subjects from the very onset of two-word
stage to two years. In order to see whether the early verbs of children function as
arguments to other operators, we noted the occurrence of verbs in negative and
interrogative sentences, in sentences with modal verbs, aspectual verbs or main
verbs taking a verb complement, and in sentence with VV compounds. To
understand whether early syntactic development reflects a gradual and
piecemeal process based purely on simple, domain-general cognitive operations,
as claimed by the usage-based researchers, or reflects the use of complex
linguistic operations, we traced the development of each verb used by the two
children and the sentence frames that it occurred in.
A sentence frame is the set of thematic roles a verb co-occurs with, taking
word order into account. The thematic roles are meant to be heuristic labels
based on adult classification. The labels include Agent, Theme, Patient,
Experiencer and Location, the semantically based category of Adverbial
Modifier, as well as closed-class categories such as negator, aspectual marker
and sentence final particle. For the convenience of analysis, we considered all
the sentences in the child production containing the same verb as belonging to
the same verb chain. For each verb chain, we began with the first occurrence of
the verb and noted its sentence frame. We then observed how the sentence
frames of the verb evolved from one session to the next, to see whether the
changes reflected simple, single cognitive operations such as substitution,
expansion, addition, coordination, occurring one at a time, or more complicated
operations.
If the child produced a word combination in which a word seemed to occupy
the same position of another word or word combination in an earlier utterance of
the same verb chain, this would be considered as an instance of substitution. The
element to be replaced could be a noun phrase or a complement of a verb.
If the child produced an utterance in which a word seemed to be an expanded
form of a constituent in the same position in an earlier utterance of the same
verb chain, involving the adding of a modifier to a bare noun, or the addition of
a complement or an aspectual marker to a verb, this would be considered a case
of expansion. If the child uttered an utterance containing a constituent which
seemed to be an addition to an early utterance of the same verb chain, then this
will be regarded as a case of addition. If the child produced an utterance which
seemed to be the integration of two previously produced combinations
belonging to the same verb chain or distinct verb chains, this would be
considered an instance of coordination.
In addition to examining the changes of sentence frames of individual verbs
in terms of substitution, expansion, addition and coordination, we paid special
attention to the first occurrence of each verb and the sentence frames the verb
occurred in. To facilitate discussion of our analysis of verb argument
development, we adopted the following classification of verb uses according to
whether these occurred for the first time in the data. A verb which had not
occurred in previous sessions was called a first-use verb. Such a verb initiated a
verb chain. A verb which had occurred in previous sessions was called a
prior-use verb. Similarly, if a verb occurred in a sentence frame that had not
been produced in earlier sessions, the frame was classified as a first-use frame; if
a verb occurred in a sentence frame that had been produced in a previous session,
it was considered as a prior-use frame.
5.2 Results on early verb-argument structure
The early verbs of children occur as arguments to other operators, contrary
to Tomasello, as can be seen from Table 7, which gives information on negated
verbs, complement verbs and VV compounds. In general, only few verbs were
recorded in interrogative sentences containing wh-phrases or the A-not-A
question operator (0 for AJR and 6 for LSY), and these numbers were not
included in the table.
Table 7. Number of verbs occurring in negative sentences, in sentences with verb complements and in [V V] compounds*
Subject Number of I
Number of II
Number of III
Number of IV
Number and
percentage of V
AJR 134 24 28 18 (13) 61 (45.5%)
LSY 170 52 25 29 (20) 87 (51.2%)
I =verbs, including adjectives; II =verbs (types), occurring in negative utterances; III =verbs (types) occurring as complements to matrix verbs, including existential, modal and aspectual verbs; IV =verbs (types) occurring as V2 in [V1V2] compounds; V =verbs (types) occurring as argument of other operator *Examples of different types of sentences are as follows: negative utterance: buyao (not want), meiyou qu (not go); verb complements: hui hua (can draw), yao mama lai (want mommy come), you wenzi guo (exist mosquito pass) , qu wan (go play); [V V] compounds in which the second verb was also used independently: qie-kai (cut-open); na-xialai (take-down), da-po (beat-broken).
The data show clearly that both children used verbs as a semantic argument
of the negator, existential, modal and aspectual verbs, as well as other matrix
verbs. The total verb lexicon of the two children in the period from one and a
half years to two years old varied in size from 134 to 170. Between 61 and 87
of their verbs, constituting 46 to 51 percent of their verb lexicons, were used as
arguments of other operators. In addition, around 70% of the second verbs in the
[V V] compounds of the two children were also used as independent predicates
in other utterances, suggesting that these verbs were functioning as complements
to the first verb in the [V V] compounds.
The development of verb-argument structure did not simply involve
domain-general cognitive operations such as expansion, addition and
coordination. Adopting Tomasello’s method, we examined all the multi-word
utterances of our subjects during the observation period to check whether these
so-called symbolic integration operations were sufficient to account for
children’s early syntax. During the observation period, AJR and LSY produced
249 and 299 utterances with three or more words respectively. As can be seen
from Table 8, only between 47 and 52 percent of the sentence frames first used
with a verb involved repetition of a previous sentence frame or a single
operation. On the other hand, between 48 and 53 percent of the sentence frames
first used with a verb involved two or more changes from prior sentence frames
used with the verb, or were frames that could not be traced to any previous
sentence frames for the verb. These figures are much higher than the 8%
reported by Tomasello for his subject. This suggests that the children were in
command of sentence frames as abstract structures and were able to apply
structures acquired for a particular verb to other verbs. Examples of sentence
frames of a verb that involved two or more putative changes from previous
sentences of the same verb chain, or were frames that could not be traced to
previous sentences of the same verb chain, are given in (1-4).
Table 8. Changes in the sentence frames of verbs in verb chains for utterances with three or more words
Number of changes from previous sentence in the same verb chain
AJR LSY
Repetition of previous sentence in the same verb chain 56 66
One change from previous sentence in the same verb chain 73 75
Subtotal 129 (51.8%)
141 (47.2%)
Two changes from previous sentence in the same verb chain 56 53
Three or more changes from previous sentence in the same verb chain
18 52
No previous sentence in the same verb chain 46 53
Subtotal 120 (48.2%)
158 (52.8%)
(1) LSY: qu Aiwan (01;06;13)
go Aiwan pavilion
"Go to Aiwan pavilion"
LSY: pingguo na qu? (01;08;02)
apple where go
"Where did the apple go?"
In (1), for LSY to produce pingguo na qu ("apple where go?"), one may say that
he had previously mastered the sentence frame [Location __ ] for the verb qu
("go"); then he could simply add a Theme before the frame to produce the more
complex sentence frame [Theme Location __ ]. However, LSY had only uttered
qu aiwan ("go Aiwan pavilion") in the sentence frame [ __ Location] before
pingguo na qu. Thus, the child had to first move the Location NP to the
preverbal position and then add the Theme pingguo before it. Two changes
would thus be needed for this development, and re-ordering would be necessary,
as shown in (2).
(2) Step 1: Reordering: [ __Location] → [Location __ ]
Step 2: Addition: [Location__ ] → [Theme Location __ ]
Even more operations would be needed for the construction of some other
utterances if one were to follow Tomasello's model. One may consider a
sentence such as (3), produced by LSY, as originating from earlier sentences as
given in (4). Two prior sentence frames of the verb hua "draw" were [ __
Instrument] and [ __ Location]. To arrive at the utterance in (3), the child would
first have to rearrange the order of the Instrument, and then negate the verb; he
would also have to coordinate these two thematic roles into a single utterance.
A possible scenario for this development is given in (5).
(3) LSY: hongse bi mei hua qiangshang (01;10;10)
Red pen not draw wall
"(I) did not use the red pen to draw on the wall"
(4) LSY hua dabing (01;07;11)
draw biscuit
"Draw biscuit"
LSY hua zhege bi (01;08;16)
draw this pen
"Draw with this pen"
(5) Step 1: Reordering : [_ Instrument] →[Instrument _ ]
Step 2: Addition: [Instrument _ ] → [Instrument Neg _ ]
Step 3: Coordination: [Instrument Neg _ ] + [ _ Location]
→ [Instrument Neg _ Location]
The development of verb argument structures in the two children reflects not
just the simple operations of substitution, expansion, addition and coordination,
but also the operations of reordering, by which two constituents are interchanged
in position, omission of constituents as well as substitution of verb phrase, in
which a verb or verb phrase was replaced by another verb or verb phrase in a
complement position or in a serial verb construction. Examples are given in (6).
(6) LSY: xihuan kanshu (01;09;26)
enjoy read-book
"(I) enjoy reading books"
LSY: xihuan nian AB (01;10;10)
enjoy say AB
"(I) enjoy reading AB"
Tomasello argues that the preservation of word order within constituents is
one of the most prominent characteristics of children’s symbolic integration
operations. This is said to indicate that what children are doing at the highest
level is concatenating symbolic structures in a very straightforward way via
mental combinations (Tomasello 1992: 237). This is not true of our data, in
which reordering appeared to be a salient operation. LSY rearranged the
positions of two constituents 21 times, in sentences containing verbs such as kan
("look"), kanjian ("see"), hua ("draw"), nian ("read") and pa ("fear").
The fact that the development of verb argument structures is not a piecemeal
process is also evidenced by the high number of verbs used for the first time in
sentence frames that had not been used previously. Table 9 shows that first-use
verbs occurred in first-use frames rather than prior-use frames for about 40-50%
of the time. Further, if one examines the first-use verbs occurring in first-use
sentence frames, the sentence frames that contained more than one constituent
outnumbered those that contained just one constituent by a ratio of
approximately 2 to 1. The results indicate that either first-use verbs shared the
same sentence frame with other previously used verbs, or they began with
complex first-use sentence frames at their first appearance. This is a further
indication that children's early syntax was not a piecemeal development from
earlier word combinations.
Table 9. Sentence frames for first-use verbs*
Number of first-use verbs in prior-use sentence frames
Number of first-use verbs in first-use sentence frames
Subjects
sentence frames with one
constituent
sentence frames with more than one constituent
sentence frames with
one constituent
sentence frames with more than one constituent
AJR 41 31 13 34
Subtotal 72 (61%) 47 (39%)
LSY 67 23 22 68
Subtotal 90 (50%) 90 (50%) *A first-use verb may occur both in sentence frames with one constituent and in sentence
frames with more than one constituent in the session. A first-use verb may occur both in prior-use frames and first-use frames in the same session. Repetitions of the same verb in the same sentence frame were not counted.
If one observes the percentage of use of first-use verbs across sessions, the
number of verbs that were used for the first time outnumbered those that had
appeared in previous sessions, for the period 01;06 to 01;08. Thereafter, the
reverse trend was observed. Every session revealed evidence of some verbs used
for the first time in first-use sentence frames. The number of first-use verbs
appearing in first-use sentence frames exceeded that of first-use verbs appearing
in prior-use frames in 40% of the sessions.
Examples of first-use verbs appearing in prior-use frames and first-use
frames are given in (7-8). The sentence frame [_ Patient] was first produced at
the age of 01;06;17 with the verb diao ("fish"). AJR then produced the verb ti
("kick") at the age of 01;10;16 in this sentence frame. In (8), the verb zai
("be/at") was first produced by LSY at the age of 01;07;16 in the first-use
sentence frame [ __ Location], which had not been used previously with any
other verb.
(7) AJR: diao yu (01;06;17)
fish fish
"(Let's go) fishing"
AJR: ti qiu (01;10;16)
kick ball
"(I'm) kicking the ball"
(8) AJR: zai nali (01;07;16)
be there
"(It's) over there"
6. Conclusions and discussion In this paper, based on longitudinal data from two children acquiring a
Southern variety of Mandarin as their native language, covering one to two
years of age, we have found that the children tuned in to the immediately
adjacent linguistic environments of words and made use of these distributional
characteristics to form the categories of verb and adjective, with some degree of
success. The categories formed by children admitted words that were not found
in corresponding adult categories, suggesting that besides using words in
contexts that have been attested in adult input, children also placed words in
linguistic contexts without having seen them so used by adults. Children by two
years of age have formed syntactic categories that reflect the distributional
properties of these categories in the adult language. The fact that children before
two are able to form syntactic categories in conformity with target language
properties is compatible with a bootstrapping account that regards syntactic
categories as substantive universals of Universal Grammar (e.g. the Semantic
Bootstrapping theory of Pinker 1984, 1987).
Children used verbs in negative sentences, in multi-verb sentences as
complements to various kinds of verbs, including existential, aspectual and
modals verbs, and as the second verb in [V V] compounds. More than 45% of
the verbs in the verb lexicon of each child occurred as an argument of some
operator, contrary to the claims of Tomasello (1992). Such productive use argues
for children's ability to use verbs as arguments of higher predicates, and points
to the availability rather than the absence of the verb category.
Finally, our detailed analysis of argument structure development before the
age of two has demonstrated that early syntactic acquisition is not a gradual,
piecemeal process, contrary to the claims of usage-based accounts. About half of
the children's sentence frames evolved from earlier sentences with the same verb
by means of more than two operations such as substitution, expansion, addition,
coordination or reordering. Children would use verbs for the first time in
sentence frames with more than one constituent, whether these had been used
with other verbs. This ability to begin using a verb in complex structures reflects
a syntactic predisposition to handle constituent structure, as well as operations
such as category-general substitution and reordering.
In demonstrating the existence of a verb category before two years of age,
our study also confirms early studies that argue for early sensitivity to syntactic
category distinctions (Valian 1986, Bloom 1990). Our study also confirms
reports on children acquiring Beijing Mandarin as their native language, which
point to early use of reordering operations and early occurrence of functional
categories in Chinese (Xiao 2004, Zhang et al 2005).
Notes
* We are indebted to various members of the Hunan Chinese Early Language
Acquisition group who contributed to the recording of LSY and AJR, and the
transcription of the recordings: Ai Zhaoyang, Zeng Tao, Huang Aijun, Chen Min,
Chen Feiyan, Liao Hui and Yang Jie. Thanks are also due to Wang Hao for his
technical support in distributional analysis. We thank Ning Chunyan for his
staunch support of acquisition research at Hunan University. We are grateful to
helpful comments from the participants of TCP2006. This research was
supported by two grants to Thomas Lee, a Research Grants Council grant (CityU
1245/02H), and a faculty start-up grant of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 1 Examples from Tomasello (1992: 230-235) included the following:
Substitution: 'drink water' > 'drink milk'; Expansion: 'lock-it' > 'lock that Lulu';
Addition: 'hit tennis' > 'Danny hit tennis', 'Maria made' > 'Maria made this
duck'; Coordination: 'Maria hit. Hit me.' > 'Maria hit me'.
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