The Syntactic Position Of Weishenme: Evidence From Child Language Acquisition

The syntactic behavior of'why'in wh-in-situ languages has attracted a great deal of attention, while the literature has been primarily concerned with the contrast between'why'and other wh-phrases. This paper deals with the syntactic position of the reason wh-adverbial weishenme'why'in Mandarin Chinese. In the literature, Lin (1992) and Ko (2005, 2006) propose that'why'in wh-in-situ languages (Chinese, Korean and Japanese) is directly merged into [Spec, CP] of the clause it modifies. The present study aims to explore the evidence from children's production to examine Lin and Ko's proposal. Thus, we propose that Chinese-speaking children initially permit'why'to merge high into the Spec of CP position.Several experiments on the acquisition of why-questions in English and Korean have been reported; however, no study of this issue in Mandarin Chinese has been conducted. Hence, this experiment is an elicitation task, which is designed to elicit weishenme-questions from children, to tell whether they base weishenme in [Spec, CP] or not. The experiment focuses on the base-generated position of weishenme, and the crucial issue is whether weishenme precedes subject in Mandarin Chinese.The experiment consists of two tests, one pilot study and one formal study, which have been processed step by step. In the pilot study, subjects are 23 children with a mean age of 4;5. Seventy hundred and seventy children participate in the formal study, and they are further categorized into five groups according to the age: 2;04;20-2;11;29, 3;00;13-3;11;26, 4;00;02-4;11;29, 5;00;02-5;11;22, and 6;00;01-6;10;17. All these participants speak Mandarin as their first language. During the test, the children are presented a few confusing pictures to produce weishenme-questions. Their responses are recorded on digital recorders, and also noted by hand. Finally, the present research effort has already yielded some expected results.The analysis of the results proves at last: (1) Chinese-speaking children initially permit weishenme to base-generate in the Spec of CP position; (2) From the tables and the figures,'age'is proved to have an impact on children's performance (i.e., the older the subjects are, the more weishenme-questions they produce); (3) Adult input does not influence children's weishenme-question pattern.Therefore, after analyzing these valid data, a conclusion could be drawn, that is, the elicited production of weishenme-questions by Mandarin-speaking children has significant influence on the language development. In the end, the paper shows research drawbacks and gives suggestions to future research.