普通话儿童早期语言中的情态量级

The modal scale in Mandarin children's early language

本文基于三名普通话儿童01;07-04;06岁自然产出的语料考察儿童情态量级的早期习得。穷尽性统计数据表明早期儿童对情态量级已经习得,除个别情态词习得受到句法共现条件制约外,情态量级基本按从可能到必然的顺序习得,这个顺序符合不同情态量级概念的语义解释及其语义形成和理解难易度。从情态副词和情态词连用的习得时间上看,儿童03;00-04;06岁主观性逐渐发展成熟并能对情态值进行调节、对主观性进行量化。本文数据也表明:早期儿童开始显现一定的语用能力并对人际功能有所理解,已经具备了对可能世界的常识性认知及一定的推理能力。

This paper investigates the early acquisition of modal scale through the spontaneous linguistic data of three Mandarin children from the age of 1 year and 7 months to 4 years and 6 months. The exhaustive statistics show that the children have acquired the modal scale in their early years following the sequence of acquisition from POSSIBLE to NECESSARY, except few modal words whose acquisition is constrained by the condition of syntactic co-occurrence.This sequence corresponds to the order of difficulty of the semantic explanation, formation and understanding of various concepts along the modal scale. The time period when the co-existence of modal adverbs and modal words is acquired tells us that the children from the age of 3years to the age of 4 years and 6 months have developed their subjectivity to adjust the modal value and quantify the subjectivity. All the data used in this paper make it clear that the children at their early years begin to show their certain pragmatic competence and some understanding of the interpersonal function in words, and they have acquired the commonsense cognition of the possible world and some reasoning ability as well.