The Acquisition of Chinese Dative Constructions
نویسندگان
چکیده
The present paper examines the acquisition of the dative construction in Chinese, centering on issues raised in Baker’s Paradox relating to how children figure out that certain syntactic rules are not completely productive (Baker, 1979; Pinker 1989). We tested 29 Chinese speaking children from Taiwan, on a forced-choice grammaticality judgment test comparing double object constructions to prepositional constructions. Results revealed that children’s acquisition of the dative in Chinese is guided by a set of Narrow Range Rules that define semantic subclasses of verbs that are permitted to alternate within the language (Pinker 1989).
منابع مشابه
Dative Constructions in Chinese
There are three dative constructions in Chinese. A verb may be present in just one, in two, or in all three constructions. A pattern can be captured in the constructional approach. While the constructions all carry a sense of transfer, they differ in terms of range of transfer and argument role of the dative object or the gei object. The constructional view also provides an account of the patte...
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