Acquiring causatives in Taiwan Southern Min

Abstract

This case study is based on the longitudinal data of a girl (LYC, 1 ; 2-3 ; 3) acquiring Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) as her first language, and it aims to discover the overgeneralization pattern of children acquiring causatives in TSM. Among the three types of causative, the errors found in other languages are mostly with lexical causatives; however, in TSM, the errors occur with morphological and analytic causatives. Being an analytic language, TSM tends to spell out the causative meaning through morphological and analytic causatives and thus most errors occur with these two types. In contrast, lexical causatives, which contain a semantic element CAUSE, were acquired late; in the data collected (1 ; 2-3 ; 3) lexical causatives were not yet found. This case study provides evidence from TSM to show a different overgeneralization pattern.