A Corpus-Based Study on the Pragmatic Use of the ba Construction in Early Childhood Mandarin Chinese.

Linda Tsung,Yang Frank Gong

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2020.607818

Abstract

This article reports on an inquiry that investigated the development of ba constructions in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of ba construction were extracted from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus collected from 168 preschoolers aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6 (year; month; Li and Tse, 2011). Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus, University of Hong Kong. Data analysis indicated that: (1) Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of 11 types of ba construction, and the children in the youngest age group (age 2;6) were able to produce six types of them; (2) children at 4 years old (age 4;6) experienced a critical developmental period of pragmatic use, and at 5 years old (age 5;6) they had attained cognitive and linguistic maturity in understanding the semantic and syntactic features of ba constructions; and (3) there was a significant age effect on the production of three types of ba construction, but no significant association between the children’s gender and their production of ba constructions. These findings offer fresh insights into understanding Chinese children’s innate capacity to understand the co-occurrence constraints concerning the syntactic, semantic and verb features inherent in ba construction, and their developmental ability to denote telic events by resorting to the appropriate ba sentence patterns.

Highlights

The ba construction is frequently used by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese
To address the research gaps described above, the present study examined the developmental order of the acquisition of different types of ba construction by Mandarin-speaking children, using naturalistic language data from the Early
Mandarin comes from a major group of North Chinese dialects, Mandarin Chinese speakers usually use “䴎-gei” as a handling or manipulative verb, which inherently agrees with the disposal meaning of the ba construction

Summary

Introduction

The ba construction is frequently used by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Different from canonical “Subjective-VP-Objective (SVO)” sentences in Mandarin Chinese, the ba construction takes the form of “ba-Object-VP.” It is seen as a unique grammatical pattern by many linguists (Wang, 1945; Liu, 1997; Ziegeler, 2000; Xu, 2011) and researchers of child language development (Li et al, 1990; Deng et al, 2018). Different from canonical “Subjective-VP-Objective (SVO)” sentences in Mandarin Chinese, the ba construction takes the form of “ba-Object-VP.”. It is seen as a unique grammatical pattern by many linguists (Wang, 1945; Liu, 1997; Ziegeler, 2000; Xu, 2011) and researchers of child language development (Li et al, 1990; Deng et al, 2018). The construction presents a range of difficulties and challenges for both L1 and L2 Chinese language learners in terms of its acquisition (e.g., Wen, 2012; Yi, 2014). There is a pressing need for researchers to investigate Chinese language learners’ developmental patterns related to the acquisition of the ba construction (Ma et al, 2017; Gong et al, 2018, 2020a,b)

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion