Abstract
Massive researches and experiments are attempting to explore the exact process of verb acquisition of child learners at an early age (1 to 3 years old). Therefore, the “syntactic bootstrapping method” is introduced and explicated in this paper, trying to illuminate whether children used syntax to learn verbs in English. Apart from English, other languages with totally different grammatical structures are also being discussed as well: regarding massive ellipsis of noun arguments (NPs) in Mandarin, researches and experiments on the acquisition of verbs in Mandarin ought to be carried out more in the near future. The purpose of this article is to give a brief introduction of word acquisition, especially verb acquisition with linguistic syntactic information; moreover, some practical hints of verb acquisition are also presented within the paper.
Highlights
Over the last 30 years, a large amount of experiments and researches are being conducted to explore the process of vocabulary acquisition
Lidz and Gleitman (2003) averred that on the foundation of syntactic bootstrapping effects, two contrasting views should be discussed: the “universalist” view and the “emergentist view”. The former one supports the idea that when young children acquire verb meaning, they use the syntactic and semantic grammar rules which already exist in their minds; at the same time, the other holds the opinion that young children learn and establish their lexical grammar through their observing and learning
When it comes to Mandarin Chinese, situation is almost the opposite side of English: despite the fact that Chinese has quite different writing forms as English, Chinese children did not learn that much grammar in their childhood, comparing to those children who speak English as mother language
Summary
Over the last 30 years, a large amount of experiments and researches are being conducted to explore the process of vocabulary acquisition. Until Naigles (1990) asserted the “syntactic bootstrapping” hypothesis, the hypothesis that the child could base on “transitive-causative” and “intransitive-not causative” syntactic grammar to recognize novel verbs in the bootstrapping experiments. This theory did not mention some particular verbs in English. Lidz and Gleitman (2003) averred that on the foundation of syntactic bootstrapping effects, two contrasting views should be discussed: the “universalist” view and the “emergentist view” The former one supports the idea that when young children acquire verb meaning, they use the syntactic and semantic grammar rules which already exist in their minds; at the same time, the other holds the opinion that young children learn and establish their lexical grammar through their observing and learning. Takes Mandarin Chinese as for instance: due to the pervasive ellipsis of noun phrase (NPs) arguments in Mandarin’s expression, it is argued whether Mandarin Chinese learners have acquired the transitive-intransitive contrasting verb expression like English maternal speakers
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