普通话儿童疑问代词指别性习得研究

Acquisition of the Identifiability of Wh-words in Child Mandarin

本文分别从问者和答者两种立场着手,对三名普通话儿童五岁前自然语料中“谁、什么、哪个”三个疑问代词指别性的习得情况进行考察。结果显示,习得序列首先受到疑问代词自身指别性质的影响,典型用法优先出现。其次,通过简单语言形式实现的用法先于通过复杂形式实现的用法习得。再次,基于现场的用法先于脱离现场的用法习得,这与此时儿童“单边合作”的认知特点有关,即儿童通常只期待对方对自己背景知识的评估,却缺乏评估对方背景知识的意识或能力,而现场性恰恰消解了这种需要根据对方的背景知识为其创造预设范围的困难。此外,以词汇手段实现的指别性先于以句法手段实现的指别性习得。

This paper investigates the acquisition of the identifiability of shui,shenme and nage in question-answer adjacency pairs based on a longitudinal data of three Mandarin children under the age of five.Wh-words like shui‘who’,shenme‘what’and nage‘which’in Mandarin Chinese vary in their identifiability.Nage ranges over a small presupposed set and thus its identifiability is high.As to shenme,its identifiability is low since it ranges over a relatively large set of presupposed elements.The identifiability features of nage and shenme are realized by their lexical properties,which are not affected by the syntactic position,whereas syntactic distribution does affect the identifiability of shui.It is found that preverbal shui is equivalent to which person,which tends to be highly identifiable,while postverbal shui is equivalent to what person,which exhibits low identifiability.The present study on the longitudinal data of the three Mandarin children shows that the typical usages of the three wh-words occur first due to their lexical identifiability.It is found that the usages expressed by the simple items are acquired earlier than those by the complicated items and that the on-site based usages are acquired before the off-site based usages.Furthermore,the acquisition of identifiability via lexical devices is prior to that via syntactic devices.