The Acquisition of Verb Argument Realization in Mandarin Chinese

摘要

This thesis examined whether the Preferred Argument Structure (PAS) theory proposed by Du Bois (1987) and its application and extension to Mandarin Chinese Chui (1992) – characterizes the early production of the argument structures in child and caregiver speech (input) of Mandarin Chinese (henceforth Mandarin). Two naturalistic longitudinal corpora of two monolingual Mandarin-learning children (age range from 0;8 to 3;9) were coded and analyzed based on two discourse-pragmatic factors suggested in Allen (2008) to investigate how the grammatical roles, the information status, and the animacy of the verb argument influence the argument realization or omission in Mandarin-speaking child and adult speech. The results show that Mandarin child and adult language conforms to the PAS patterns partially in Du Bois (1987) and supports the Mandarin-specific PAS features in Chui (1992). Children and adults are also similar in their overall realization and omission of arguments as conditioned by the same discourse-pragmatic factors such as the information status and animacy of the arguments, which reveals the effects of input in children's tuning-in of the Mandarin-specific discourse-pragmatic typological features.