Space, Events and Language Acquisition in Mandarin

This dissertation examines the syntax and semantics of Mandarin spatial expressions from a comparative perspective grounded in the theoretical framework of event semantics. A thorough understanding of the linguistic encoding of space enables us to gain insight into language specificity, and language universals underlying surface variation. The putative language universals discussed in this study include aspect shift of the verb (Smith 1997; Rothstein 2004), spatial PPs as event modifiers (Parsons 1990), and Figure-Ground asymmetry (Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976; Talmy 1983). These universals allow us to account for, for instance, the distribution and interpretation of Mandarin spatial PPs headed by zai, which are determined by the event structure of the co-occurring verbs (Fong 1997; Liu 2009). When zai -PPs occur before a placement verb, an Accomplishment, they are potentially ambiguous due to subevent modification of the PPs. When zai-PPs occur after a posture verb, they express a static location, or a result location, since the verb undergoes aspect shift from State, its default event type, to Achievement, the derived one. In spoken Mandarin, only verbs that have a dynamic/result state component in their event structures can take postverbal zai-PPs. Verbs that can enter two-argument locative subject constructions should also have a dynamic/result state in their event structures.;Mandarin has its language-specific properties and complexities: information about the axial parts of the reference entity is encoded by localizers in Mandarin, whose status as nouns or postpositions is still debated; Mandarin LP-formation is complex, with some variants depending on the nature of the DP subcategorized by the localizer.;The present study includes a corpus study of Mandarin-speaking children aged between 1;9 and 6;0, and an experimental study on five groups of children (2-, 3-, 4-, 5- and 6-year olds) with an adult control group. Inconsistent cues in the input slow down acquisition: children up to 6;0 omitted localizers that are obligatory, and allowed the localizer li 'inside' to follow proper names; 4-year-olds significantly differed from adults in tolerating non-target V-Location word order, as the mapping of Location to syntactic position is not consistent. Children's overgeneralization indicates a rule-based learning mechanism. Cognitive development manifests its influence on the acquisition orders of localizers and children's reliance on deictic pronouns, the viewer-centered perspective and the aligned reference strategy.;The empirical findings help to resolve some linguistic issues. Children as young as 3;0 are sensitive to the ambiguity of zai-PPs with placement verbs and posture verbs, providing ontogenetic evidence for the category of event, and for the psychological reality of aspect shift and (sub)event modification. The directional reading of preverbal zai -PPs with placement verbs is preferred over the locational one by children and adults, suggesting the salience of the result state in the event structure of placement verbs. The locational reading is preferred to the directional one by children and adults, as the default event type of posture verbs is State. In forming LPs, children used de, which takes nouns after it, more than adults, supporting Li's (1990) analysis of localizers as nouns.;Key words: Mandarin, acquisition, event, event structure, localizer.