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Table 7. Number of verbs occurring in negative sentences, in sentences with verb
complements and in [V V] compounds*
Subject # of verbs # of verbs # of verbs # of verbs # and
(types, (types) (types) (types) percentage
including occurring occurring as occurring as V2 of verbs
adjectives) in negative complements in [V1 V2] (types)
utterances to matrix verbs compounds, (# occurring as
(including of those V2 argument of
existential, which also other
modal and occurred as operator
aspectual
verbs)
independent
predicates)
AJR 134 24 28 18 (13) 61 (45.5%)
LSY 170 52 25 29 (20) 87 (51.2%)
*Examples of different types of sentences are as follows: negative utterance: buyao (not want),
meiyou qu (not go); verb complements: hui hua (can draw), yao mama lai (want mommy
come), you wenzi guo (exist mosquito pass) , qu wan (go play); [V V] compounds in which
the second verb was also used independently: qie-kai (cut-open); na-xialai (take-down),
da-po (beat-broken).
The data show clearly that both children used verbs as a semantic argument of the
negator, existential, modal and aspectual verbs, as well as other matrix verbs.
3.3 The feasibility of distributional bootstrapping for verbs (Cai 2006, Xiao, Cai
and Lee 2006)
We analyzed adult input to the two Mandarin-acquiring children from around 1 year 2
months to 2 years of age, following the method of Mintz (2003). We extracted every
sequence of three adjoining words from each utterance. In each such sequence, the
intervening word was the target and the neighboring words were considered as the
frame, i.e. the linguistic environment of the target word.
The frequency of each frame, as well as that of each intervening word in the frames,
was recorded. In this analysis, a subset of all frames whose frequency reached 15 or
more were considered as frequent frames. With respect to frames in children’s
production, those whose frequency reached 3 or more were considered as frequent
frames.
The intervening words of each frequent frame were assigned category labels
according to the linguistic criteria for word classes in Mandarin Chinese. To compute
the accuracy score for each frame, all possible pairs of words in the category were
compared. Each pair was classified as a hit or false alarm. A hit was recorded when
two words were from the same syntactic category. And a false alarm was recorded
when two items were from different syntactic categories.
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