An Investigation Of The Restrictive Focus Zhi "only" In Chinese Children

Children’s acquisition of restrictive focus adverbs is a hot issue in the languageacquisition research. In Chinese, adults tend to associate the pre-subject restrictive focusadverb zhi ‘only’ with the subject. For example, Zhiyou Mali chi-le xiangjiao ‘Only Mary atea banana’ means that except Mary, no one else ate a banana. Whether children and adults havethe same understanding of the relationship between the syntactic position of zhi ‘only’ and theelements it restricts is a problem worth exploring. In this study, two investigations with theTruth Value Judgment Task were conducted to investigate Chinese children’s interpretationsof pre-subject zhi ‘only’ through the comparison between adults and children.Previous studies of children’s acquisition of restrictive focus operator zhi ‘only’ mainlyhave yielded two major findings. The first one is that children tend to understand pre-subjectzhi ‘only’ as preverbal zhi ‘only’. That is to say, children think sentences like Zhiyou Malichi-le xiangjiao ‘Only Mary ate a banana’ has the same meaning as Mali zhi chi-le xiangjiao‘Mary only ate a banana’. The other aspect that aroused researchers’ interest is that ininterpreting ambiguous sentences of preverbal zhi ‘only’, children would adopt the semanticsubset principle, while adults follow the principle of parsimony. For example, the sentenceXiaonanhai zhi bei-zhe shubao ‘The little boy is only carrying a bag’, adults would think it iscorrect as long as what the little boy is carrying is a bag, no matter whether he is also holdinga flower spot or flying a kite, etc. However, children will accept the sentence under thecondition that all the activities the little boy is doing is carrying a bag. The present studyfocuses on the first point. We want to know whether children have VP-focus tendency wheninterpreting pre-subject zhi and testify whether negation could assist children in reaching theadult-like interpretation of pre-subject zhi mentioned in Zhou and Crain. This study aims toaddress three questions:(1). Do children have VP-focus tendency when interpreting sentenceswith pre-subject zhi ‘only’?(2). Does negation assist them in reaching adult-likeinterpretation?(3). Are there any clear differences of children from3to6years old? Ifnegation does not affect children’s understanding of this problem, how do they converge onthe target grammar?The results showed that children aged4-6years old do have VP-focus tendency when interpreting pre-subject zhi. But children not always chose the non-adult understanding. Theyown two understandings at the same time. That is to say, one single child could understand thetest sentence correctly in one story and then takes the VP-focus interpretation in another.Depending on which understanding one child chose in most test sentences, we divided thesechildren into two groups: one was ‘almost VP-focus interpretation’ group; the other one was‘almost adult-like interpretation’ group. On the contrary, the vast majority of adults had noVP-focus tendency. Our Experiment2showed that negation has little effect on children’sunderstanding of pre-subject zhi ‘only’ and there is no clear age difference of children from4to6years old. The results of Experiment1support most scholars’ viewpoints (Yang,Restrictive Focus; Notley et al.; Zhou and Crain). With regard to the different results of ourExperiment2from Experiment3in Zhou and Crain, we propose that input in the languageacquisition and the different growth environment may play an important role in children’slanguage acquisition. It should be noted, however, temporary misunderstanding in the testsentences does not necessarily mean a lack of knowledge of restrictive focus. Children justneed to contact more corpuses to support them to make the right choice.