Structure of Mandarin Particles with Evidence of Acquisition Data

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220131.045How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Mandarin; Syntactic Acquisition; Generative Syntax

Abstract

This study explores the properties and structure of Mandarin particles under the framework of generative syntax. Over the years, Chinese syntacticians differ in the categorization of the particle ‘le’ while acquisition researchers tend to disregard this distinction. In our study, five longitudinal studies in CHILDES corpora are examined to address this ambiguity of ‘le’ in Mandarin acquisition, and separate time windows are found from acquiring sentence-final ‘le’ to postverbal ‘le’. Children’s early syntactic knowledge on this demonstrates the necessity of a two-le analysis. Then, with tests on negated sentences, a structure is proposed to account for the head position of the postverbal ‘le’. Le’s behavior in sentences of negated forms differs from that of the other essential postverbal particle ‘guo’, and thus the minimal structure within Mandarin inflectional domain needs to be expanded as a way to accommodate both acquisition data and negation tests. Implications of the relations between theoretical syntax and acquisition are discussed.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Junping Zhu
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/02/01
TI  - Structure of Mandarin Particles with Evidence of Acquisition Data
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Education, Language and Art (ICELA 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 246
EP  - 252
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220131.045
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220131.045
ID  - Zhu2022
ER  -