Time-location-case, Basis-reason-case And Relevance-case Prepositions In Child Language

The paper investigates the development of Chinese children of Han nationality's acquiring time-location-case, basis-reason-case and relevance-case prepositions. The children are from one to five . The paper centers on time-location-case prepositions which have fully developed in child language and gives a concrete description to the three kinds of prepositions from the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects . Based on this , the paper divides the process of children acquiring prepositions into four stages and three sequences . The conclusion is that the difficulty of semantic cognition , linguistic tactics , language inputting frequency and the own character of linguistic elements are the motivations of the three prepositions' development sequence . The paper compares some phenomena of children acquiring prepositions to the process of grammaticalization . There exists some similar but different deep-level motivations and mechanisms between child language acquisition and human language development .The opinions on the child language acquisition which are put forward in this paper will be valuable to Linguistic of Child Language , Congitive Psychology , Chinese Grammar and relative subjects . The discussion on the child language acquiring is also helpful to the study of grammaticalization.