Focus identification in child Mandarin

MPhil Thesis, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011

wh-questions couched in the framework of the Minimalist Program. According to the previous studies , focus intervention effects refer to the phenomena that a wh-question is ungrammatical when a focus operator (henceforth, F-Op) introduced by a focused subject or a focus particle intervenes between an in-situ wh-word and the interrogative Complementizer (henceforth, C [Q] ).

Cognition, 2003

We report three studies investigating children’s and adults’ comprehension of sentences containing the focus particle "only". In Experiments 1 and 2, four groups of participants (6–7 years, 8–10 years, 11–12 years and adult) compared sentences with "only" in different syntactic positions against pictures that matched or mismatched events described by the sentence. Contrary to previous findings (Crain, S., Ni, W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum; Philip, W., & Lynch, E. (1999). Felicity, relevance, and acquisition of the grammar of every and only. In S. C. Howell, S. A. Fish, & T. Keith-Lucas (Eds.), Proceedings of the 24th annual Boston University conference on language development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press) we found that young children predominantly made errors by failing to process contrast information rather than errors in which they failed to use syntactic information to restrict the scope of the particle. Experiment 3 replicated these findings with pre-schoolers.

In this paper, we investigated how Mandarin-speaking children and adults understand the scope relation between the universal quantifier and negation in sentences like Mei-pi ma dou meiyou tiaoguo liba 'Every horse didn't jump over the fence' and Bushi meipi ma dou tiaoguo-le liba 'Not every horse jumped over fence'. We found that Mandarin-speaking children accepted these two types of sentences in both the surface scope and the inverse scope scenarios, whereas Mandarin-speaking adults only permitted them in the surface scope scenarios. The findings of this study, combined with previous research with English-speaking children, invite the conclusion that children start off with a flexible scope relation between the universal quantifier and negation. Children's grammar allows flexibility in the mappings between syntax and semantics. # The paper is organized as follows. First we introduce the relevant scope phenomena in English and in Mandarin Chinese. Then we review previous research on children's understanding of sentences with the universal quantifier and negation. Finally, we present two experiments investigating Mandarin-speaking children's interpretation of sentences involving the universal quantifier and negation.

2019

How various types of focus differ with respect to exhaustivity has been a topic of enduring interest in language studies. However, most of the theoretical work explicating such associations has done so cross-linguistically, and little research has been done on how people process and respond to them during language comprehension. This study therefore investigates the associations between the concept of exhaustivity and three focus types in Chi-nese (wh, cleft, and only foci) using a trichotomous-response design in two experiments: a forced-choice judgment and a self-paced reading experiment, both with adult native speakers. Its results show that, whether engaged in conscious decision-making or an implicit comprehension process, the participants distinguished only-focus and cleft-focus from wh-focus clearly, and also that there are specific differences between only-focus and cleft-focus in conscious decision-making. This implies that, in terms of the relationship between exhaustivity and the focus types under investigation, cleft-focus and only-focus behave very similarly during language comprehension despite the existence of some fine distinctions between them. In other words, the potential linguistic levels that exhaustivity encodes in Chinese cleft-focus render it more similar to only-focus than to wh-focus. These results are broadly in line with the semantic account that distinguishes cleft from only-focus, i.e., that cleft encodes exhaustivity in not-at-issue presupposition and only-focus encodes exhaustivity in at-issue assertion, while both express semantically encoded exhaustivity, triggering robust language-processing patterns that differ from patterns of wh-focus in Chinese.

1995

This dissertation investigates topic and focus constructions in Mandarin Chinese with particular emphasis on understanding their structural representations. Structural focus involving overt focus movement is manifested in lian...dou/ye 'even...all/also' and object preposing constructions in Chinese. Chapter two first provides detailed discussion of the categorial status of lian, dou/ye and focused constituents that admit movement, the interpretation of lian...dou/ye sentences, and Chinese clausal structure. I propose a post-subject, strict preverbal focus projection, which is structurally distinct from topic. Post-verbal elements undergo focus movement to the strict preverbal focus projection, called (lian-) focalization. Focalization is triggered by formal [+Focus] feature checking in Spec-Head configuration, adopting Chomsky (1993; 1995). Chapter three presents movement diagnoses and a unified account for both lian..dou/ye and object preposing cases. The Chinese cleft construction with shi 'be' behaves like other focus adverbs or operators, in contrast to the cleft focus movement attested in English and Hungarian (Culicover (1993), Horvath (1986), Kiss (1994), etc.). Focus and topic are grammatical distinguished with respect to the strict postsubject and preverbal position. Nevertheless, a focus constituent can occur in sentence-initial position. In chapter four I propose that the focus constituent can either be topicalized to be contrastively interpreted or base-generated sentence-initially to denote whole sentence focus scope. Consequently, the traditionally assumed discourse distinction of "new" and "old" information in focus and topic cannot xi adequately account for the Chinese facts in this regard. Namely, a focus can be topicalized. Thus, a merged grammatical representation for both topic and "focused topic" is called for. I argue that Chinese does display movement of topicalization. The genuinely moved topic moves to the TopicP Spec position in root contexts. The topicalized sentence represents predicational judgment, in the sense of Kuroda (1965; 1972; 1992). Moreover, I argue for a base-generated IP-adjoined major subject position for the so-called base-generated "topic" with or without a gap. The basegeneration structure also hinges on the presence of major subject in Chinese, on a par with that in Japanese. Hence, the proposed structure provides a unified account for the long-standing debate of (non-) movement of topic structure, and the identification of empty categories and overt pronominal copies. Chapter five discusses related issues of scrambling and focus scope. Chinese movement structures do not correspond to Japanese scrambling. Even-focus scope is represented in the overt syntax in Chinese but at LF in English (e.g. Karttunen and Peters (1979) and Rooth (1985)).

Frontiers in Psychology, 2021

Portioning-out and individuation are two important semantic properties for the characterization of countability. In Mandarin, nouns are not marked with count-mass syntax, and it is controversial whether individuation is encoded in classifiers or in nouns. In the present study, we investigates the interpretation of a minimal pair of non-interrogative wh-pronominal phrases, including duo-shao-N and duo-shao-ge-N. Due to the presence/absence of the individual classifier ge, these two wh-pronominal phrases differ in how they encode portioning-out and individuation. In two experiments, we used a Truth Value Judgment Task to examine the interpretation of these two wh-pronominal phrases by Mandarin-speaking adults and 4-to-6-year-old children. We found that both adults and children are sensitive to their interpretative differences with respect to the portioning-out and individuation properties. They assign either count or mass readings to the bare wh-pronominal phrase duo-shao-N depending ...

Journal of East Asian Linguistics, 2015

In this paper, we investigate focus intervention effects in Mandarin multiple wh-questions, showing that such effects arise only if a focus particle and its focus associate intervene between the interrogative complementizer C [Q] and one or more in-situ wh-phrases. We further show that focus intervention effects are not observed when a focus particle takes all the in-situ wh-phrases in its c-command domain as its focus associates. Adopting Pesetsky and Torrego's (2007) feature-sharing view of Agree, we propose that the dependency between C [Q] and an in-situ wh-phrase can be reduced to an Agree relation. In addition, adopting Rizzi's (2004) refined version of Relativized Minimality, we propose that focus intervention effects are induced by the presence of a Focus Phrase that prohibits C [Q] from establishing proper dependencies with the in-situ wh-phrases.

First Language, 2019

The syntactic structure of sentences in which a new word appears may provide listeners with cues to that new word's form class. In English, for example, a noun tends to follow a determiner (a/an/the), while a verb precedes the morphological inflection [ing]. The presence of these markers may assist children in identifying a word's form class and thus glean some information about its meaning. This study examined whether Mandarin, a language that has a relatively impoverished morphosyntactic system, offers reliable morphosyntactic cues to the noun-verb distinction in child-directed speech (CDS). Using the CHILDES Beijing corpora, Study 1 found that Mandarin CDS has reliable morphosyntactic markers to the noun-verb distinction. Study 2 examined the Corresponding authors:

Languages vary in the ways in which words for conjunction and words for disjunction are interpreted in sentences with negation. To explain the cross-linguistic differences, we propose that words for conjunction and disjunction are interpreted as positive polarity items (PPIs) in some languages (e.g., Mandarin) but not in other languages (e.g., English). If this is correct, then languages should converge on the same intepretations when the polarity sensitivity of conjunction and disjunction is cancelled. One linguistic context that is known to cancel the polarity sensitivity of the English PPI some is in the predicate phrase of sentences with focus operators. We apply this diagnostic to the expressions for disjunction and conjunction in Mandarin and in English. The expectation is that universal principles of semantic interpetation will become operative when conjunction and disjunction words appear in the predicate phrase of focus operators. Since conjunction words and disjunction words are not analyzed as PPIs in this linguistic context, the meaning that is assigned to these words should be the same in all human languages, including child language. By investigating both adult and child English and Mandarin, we show that focus operators do indeed cancel the polarity sensitivity of conjunction words and disjunction words in typologically different languages, and this permits us to witness the invariant logical meanings assigned to these locial connectives in human languages.

Studies in Chinese Language and Discourse, 2016

This study examines the emergent linguistic properties of the early production of verb argument structure in Mandarin Chinese. Longitudinal naturalist speech data of one Mandarin-learning child were coded and analyzed for their argument structure from age 1;3 to 3;4, the crucial age for early syntactic development. The results reveal early emergence and dominance of transitive verbs and the themeonly argument. Transitive verbs tend to have reduced number of arguments, whereas intransitive verbs tend to sustain one argument. The acquisition of thematic roles proceeds in the order of theme, agent, location, and recipient. The child's production of verb argument structure reflects the typological features of Mandarin. It also suggests some language-general route in the acquisition of argument structure.

Journal of cognitive science, 2009

When presented with an entity (e.g., a wooden honey-dipper) labeled with a novel noun, how does a listener know that the noun refers to an instance of an object kind (honey-dipper) rather than to a substance kind (wood)? While English speakers draw upon count-mass syntax for clues to the noun's meaning, linguists have proposed that classifier languages, which lack count-mass syntax, provide other syntactic cues. Three experiments tested Mandarin-speakers' sensitivity to the diminutive suffix -zi and the general classifier ge when interpreting novel nouns. Experiment 1 found that -zi occurs more frequently with nouns that denote object kinds. Experiment 2 demonstrated Mandarin-speaking adults' sensitivity to ge and -zi when inferring novel word meanings. Experiment 3 tested Mandarin three- to six-year-olds' sensitivity to ge. We discuss differences in the developmental course of these cues relative to cues in English, and the impact of this difference to children'...

This study investigated 4-year-old children's knowledge of the structural constraints on ellipsis constructions in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on the structural difference between verb phrase (VP) ellipsis and null object constructions. In Mandarin Chinese, if the antecedent clause of a VP-ellipsis structure contains an adverbial modifier, this adverbial modifier must be recovered at the elided site in the second clause. However, if the antecedent clause of a null object construction contains an adverbial modifier, the reconstruction of this adverbial modifier at the elided site is not necessary. Two experiments were conducted to examine whether young Mandarin-speaking children are sensitive to this structural difference between the two ellipsis constructions. The results show that children exhibited adult-like performance in both experiments. This is evidence that young Mandarin-speaking children have knowledge of the structural difference between VP-ellipsis and null object constructions with regard to adverbial recovery. We interpreted the findings in conjunction with previous research as evidence that children's knowledge of the structural constraints on ellipsis constructions is innately specified.

2021

Prosodic focus plays an important role during speech communication, delivering speakers’ pragmatical intention to emphasize key information, especially in contrastive scenarios. Previous studies exploring children’s acquisition of prosodic focus have generally focused on Germanic and Romance languages, while it was unclear when children learning Mandarin Chinese were able to correctly interpret the pragmatic meaning of prosodic focus and integrate it into speech comprehension. The current study explored Mandarin-learning 3-6-year-olds’ online interpretation of prosodic focus to identify contrastive referents. Twenty 3-4-year-olds, 23 5-6-year-olds, and 22 adult controls were tested. The visual-world paradigm was adopted, where participants were instructed to search for target pictures while listening to contrastive objects in discourse sequences, e.g., Find the red cat. Now, find the PURPLE/purple cat , where the second adjective was produced with or without prosodic focus. Particip...

Language and Linguistics, 2009

This paper investigates three Mandarin-speaking children's corpora (1;9 through 2;1) to study their acquisition of aspects and modals. Their perfect distinction and use of the aspectual and modal negators, mei and bu, suggest the existence of AspectP and ModalP, which supports the Strong Continuity Hypothesis (Lust 1999). I argue that the lack of overt aspect markers and modals in their affirmative sentences is due to their aspect-and modal-marking mechanisms that are different from the adults', i.e. movement vs. licensing and overt operator vs. covert operator, which, however, are possible dialectal and cross-linguistic variations. The findings are consistent with the Principles-and-Parameters approach to child language development (Hyams 1986).