CORPUS STUDY OF CHINESE HERITAGE CHILDREN: ACQUISITION OF DIRECTIONAL VERB COMPLEMENTS IN MANDARIN USED FOR MOTION EVENTS

Back to Page Authors: Sheng-nan Zhao, Virginia Yip

Keywords: bilingual children, heritage, directional verb complements, motion event, Mandarin acquisition

Abstract: This corpus-based study investigates the acquisition of Chinese heritage and mono-lingual children between 1;07~4;11 in terms of Mandarin Directional Verb Constructions (DVCs) used in motion event expressions based on naturalistic speech from Corpus (Mai, Matthews and Yip 2018, Deng and Yip 2018, Zhou 2004) available in CHILDES. While English has verb particles as satellite components to express path information, Mandarin generally has 24 DVCs (10 simple monosyllabic and 14 complex disyllabic DVCs) to encode trajectories in motion events. However, the Mandarin DVC construction is more complicated because it is determined by many varieties such as DVC types, verb types, object locations etc. Besides, the language policies adopted by parents of heritage children may play a role too. After sorting the relevant corpus data, analysis of the 5 children’s (3 heritage and 2 monolingual children) da-ta shows that the proportional trends of tokens of DVC(a), DVC(b) and DVC(c) used in motion events are different: DVC(a) and DVC(b) decrease while DVC(c) increases. Concerning first emergence, DVC(b) with lai2 'come hither' and qu4 'go thither' is easy to acquire and appears at an early stage, whereas DVC(a) which has metaphorical meanings and complex DVC(c) are difficult to acquire. Additionally, the BA construction is the most used construction in heritage children’s first emergence utterances with DVCs while for monolinguals DVC constructions with intransitive verbs make up the largest component. Last but not the least, according to the data, Avia, the heritage child whose parents adopt a one-parent-one-language policy achieves a comparable pattern more similar to the monolingual child than those whose parents adopt the one-context-one-language policy.