Focus and scales: L1 acquisition of CAI and JIU in Mandarin Chinese.
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TextDescription: 279 pISBN: 0599914416Subject(s): Language, Linguistics | Psychology, Cognitive | 0290 | 0633Dissertation note: Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong (People's Republic of China), 2000. Summary: This dissertation investigates Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of CAI and JIU. CAI and JIU are two closely related scalar focus particles. By focusing a specific element in the sentence, they introduce a set of expected alternatives in contrast to that element and order them on underlying pragmatic scales. CAI evokes scales on which the asserted element is higher than the expected elements while JIU induces scales on which the asserted element is lower than the expected elements. This is why CAI and JIU contrast when they associate with a preceding element in the time, quantity, or conditional domains. CAI expresses lateness, larger quantity or marks a necessary condition whereas JIU implies earliness, smaller quantity or highlights a sufficient condition. As restrictive focus particles, CAI and JIU do not contrast in meaning and contribute to the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence. They place a condition of uniqueness on the sentence and can only associate with an element to their right in their c-command domain.Summary: A series of experimental studies have been conducted to explore 4- to 8-year-olds' understanding of different meaning aspects of CAI/JIU. The elicited imitation, sentence selection, truth value judgment, and elicited inference experiments examine children's understanding of CAI/JIU scalar implicatures and meaning contrast in the time, quantity, and conditional domains. The two picture verification studies test children's understanding of restrictive focus. It has been found that 4- to 6-year-olds' knowledge of CAI/JIU scalar meanings is far from complete: they are still unable to fully differentiate between CAI and JIU and to draw the inferences about the speaker's expectation solely on the basis of CAI/JIU. Yet at this age, they have developed some sensitivity to the co-occurrence restrictions on CAI/JIU and displayed some understanding of CAI/JIU in certain domains. Generally speaking, JIU is understood better than CAI. In addition, time and quantity CAI and JIU are understood better than conditional CAI and JIU. As for restrictive focus, it has been found that children tend to associate the restrictive focus particle with the predicate no matter whether it occurs in pre-subject or preverbal positions.Summary: The findings obtained from the present research suggest that children rely on contextual cues to derive CAI/JIU scalar meanings before a full knowledge of CAI/JIU is attained and that the acquisition of CAI/JIU scales reveals certain fundamental human cognitive processes such as directionality and cross-domain mappings. Children's interpretation of conditional CAI/JIU is reflective of their sensitivity to two different components of conditionals, i.e. semantics and pragmatics of conditionals. That children associate both pre-subject and preverbal focus particles with the predicate indicates an early acquisition of the predicate-focus structure. It is argued that this has to do with the isomorphic mapping between the predicate-focus structure and the topic-comment pragmatic structure of languages on the one hand and the topic-prominence property and the superiority of adverbial quantifiers over determiner quantifiers of Mandarin Chinese on the other.
Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 61-08, Section: A, page: 3151.
Supervisor: Gladys Tang.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong (People's Republic of China), 2000.
This dissertation investigates Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of CAI and JIU. CAI and JIU are two closely related scalar focus particles. By focusing a specific element in the sentence, they introduce a set of expected alternatives in contrast to that element and order them on underlying pragmatic scales. CAI evokes scales on which the asserted element is higher than the expected elements while JIU induces scales on which the asserted element is lower than the expected elements. This is why CAI and JIU contrast when they associate with a preceding element in the time, quantity, or conditional domains. CAI expresses lateness, larger quantity or marks a necessary condition whereas JIU implies earliness, smaller quantity or highlights a sufficient condition. As restrictive focus particles, CAI and JIU do not contrast in meaning and contribute to the truth-conditional meaning of the sentence. They place a condition of uniqueness on the sentence and can only associate with an element to their right in their c-command domain.
A series of experimental studies have been conducted to explore 4- to 8-year-olds' understanding of different meaning aspects of CAI/JIU. The elicited imitation, sentence selection, truth value judgment, and elicited inference experiments examine children's understanding of CAI/JIU scalar implicatures and meaning contrast in the time, quantity, and conditional domains. The two picture verification studies test children's understanding of restrictive focus. It has been found that 4- to 6-year-olds' knowledge of CAI/JIU scalar meanings is far from complete: they are still unable to fully differentiate between CAI and JIU and to draw the inferences about the speaker's expectation solely on the basis of CAI/JIU. Yet at this age, they have developed some sensitivity to the co-occurrence restrictions on CAI/JIU and displayed some understanding of CAI/JIU in certain domains. Generally speaking, JIU is understood better than CAI. In addition, time and quantity CAI and JIU are understood better than conditional CAI and JIU. As for restrictive focus, it has been found that children tend to associate the restrictive focus particle with the predicate no matter whether it occurs in pre-subject or preverbal positions.
The findings obtained from the present research suggest that children rely on contextual cues to derive CAI/JIU scalar meanings before a full knowledge of CAI/JIU is attained and that the acquisition of CAI/JIU scales reveals certain fundamental human cognitive processes such as directionality and cross-domain mappings. Children's interpretation of conditional CAI/JIU is reflective of their sensitivity to two different components of conditionals, i.e. semantics and pragmatics of conditionals. That children associate both pre-subject and preverbal focus particles with the predicate indicates an early acquisition of the predicate-focus structure. It is argued that this has to do with the isomorphic mapping between the predicate-focus structure and the topic-comment pragmatic structure of languages on the one hand and the topic-prominence property and the superiority of adverbial quantifiers over determiner quantifiers of Mandarin Chinese on the other.
School code: 1307.
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