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The development of aspectual marking in child Mandarin Chinese

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 December 2009

JIDONG CHEN  and
YASUHIRO SHIRAI
JIDONG CHEN*
Affiliation:
California State University at Fresno
YASUHIRO SHIRAI
Affiliation:
University of Pittsburgh
*
ADDRESS FOR CORRESPONDENCE Jidong Chen, Department of Linguistics, California State University at Fresno, 5245 North Backer Avenue, PB 92, Fresno, CA 93740. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Cross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal tendency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four grammatical aspect markers in Mandarin, -le (perfective), zai (progressive), -zhe (durative), and -guo (experiential), in the longitudinal speech data of four children acquiring Mandarin Chinese. It was found that the emergence of grammatical aspect marking generally follows the predictions of the aspect hypothesis, perfective -le predominantly appearing with telic verbs, whereas progressive zai is almost exclusively used with activity verbs. However, the typological features of Mandarin also affect the early uses of -le, which is used with stative predicates more frequently than predicted, and the input patterns play an important role in children's aspect marking. The results support a usage-based learning process in accord with a language-specific system of aspectual semantics, rather than a strong universal association of grammatical aspect and lexical aspect.

Type
Articles
Information
Applied Psycholinguistics , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 2010 , pp. 1 - 28
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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