儿童汉语中的限制焦点

Restrictive focus in child Mandarin

当代语言学研究的一个重要领域是自然语言的焦点结构。焦点结构复杂、抽象,它所表达的意义远远超出了句子的字面意义,给习得带来困难。本研究讨论儿童语言中的限制焦点。我们通过看图判断句子正误的实验,考察了说汉语的儿童对汉语中限制焦点助词“只”与“就”的理解。实验结果表明,四至六岁儿童一般忽略限制焦点助词的分布,他们对主语前“只/就”和动词前“只/就”的理解完全相同。这一结果与研究人员对说英语的儿童限制焦点的发展的观察基本一致。说汉语的儿童倾向于将汉语的限制焦点理解为表谓语焦点。其主要原因有二:(1)谓语焦点结构与自然语言信息表达的非标记性结构(即主题-述语结构)同构;(2)汉语的主题突出性以及汉语量词的特点也可能影响说汉语的儿童对限制焦点的理解。

An important area in contemporary linguistic research is focus. Focus structures are highly abstract and complicated and pose learnability problems in their acquisition. The present research explores Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of restrictive focus. A truth-value judgment experiment has been conducted to investigate children's understanding of restrictive focus particles ZHI and JIU in Mandarin Chinese. The results show that four-to-six-year-old children tend to associate the restrictive focus particle with the predicate, no matter whether it occurs in pre-subject or preverbal positions. This suggests an early acquisition of predicate-focus structures for Mandarin-speaking children. It is argued that this has to do with the isomorphic mapping between the predicate-focus structure and the topic-comment pragmatic structure of languages on the one hand, and the topic-prominence property and the superiority of adverbial quantifiers over determiner quantifiers of Mandarin Chinese on the other.