Slides

LSY hua zhege bi (01;08;16)
draw this pen
"Draw with this pen"
(iii) Step 1: Reordering : [_ Instrument] →[Instrument _ ]
Step 2: Addition: [Instrument _ ] → [Instrument Neg _ ]
Step 3: Coordination: [Instrument Neg _ ] + [ _ Location]
→ [Instrument Neg _ Location]
Reordering was a salient operation. LSY rearranged the positions of two constituents
21 times, in sentences containing verbs such as kan ("look"), kanjian ("see"), hua
("draw"), nian ("read") and pa ("fear").
First-use verbs occurred in first-use frames rather than prior-use frames for about
40-50% of the time.
4. Assessing the discrepancies in the empirical findings
4.1 The arbitrariness of criteria
Are the criteria reasonable, even for adults (cf. production of sentence final particles
or relative clauses in a Chinese adult)
Why limit ourselves to naturalistic production data How about comprehension data
The requirements of diversity of membership and combinatorial versatility may be
overly stringent. Assessment of Diessel (2004)'s findings.
4.2 Accounting for cross-linguistic differences
Early development of inflectional features is not observed for English, because the
morphemes that mark tense, person and number are not phonologically salient.
Early development of inflectional features is observed for German, Dutch, French
because of word order reflexes of inflectional features.
Early emergence of the verb category in Chinese, reflected in verb argument
structures and in the viability of distributional bootstrapping in word class acquisition,
could have been facilitated by the prominence of V in reduplication structures and the
syllabic form of aspectual markers.
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