A Case Study of Early Acquisition of Chinese Modals

DOI

10.2991/icsshe-17.2017.46How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Chinese modals, early acquisition, case study

Abstract

The present study investigates the emergence and early development of Chinese modals of a single child from 1; 8 to 2; 7 from the lexical, semantic, syntactic and pragmatic perspectives. The results show that: 1) Chinese modals emerge gradually between 1; 8 - 2; 5, and modal forms that are acquired early tend to occur more frequently; 2) compared to dynamic and deontic modals, epistemic modals are later acquired and the use frequency is low; 3) the syntactic structures of modal utterances present a gradual trend from simple to complex; 4) modal utterances indicate the correspondence between semantic interpretation and syntactic distribution.

Copyright

© 2017, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Shuzhen Chen
AU  - Yuqian Ma
PY  - 2017/09
DA  - 2017/09
TI  - A Case Study of Early Acquisition of Chinese Modals
BT  - Proceedings of the 2017 3rd International Conference on Social Science and Higher Education
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 183
EP  - 186
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/icsshe-17.2017.46
DO  - 10.2991/icsshe-17.2017.46
ID  - Chen2017/09
ER  -