| Chinese sentence construction has always been a key issue in the study of Chinese,and has been concerned and studied by considerable scholars.Therefore,a lot of research results have been achieved in the ontological study of Chinese sentence.However,there is still research gap for the study of the sentence construction development for native Mandarin-speaking children.The development of children’s language proficiency can be reflected by the combination of mean length of utterance(MLU)and acquired sentence constructions.In the previous study of sentence construction acquisition,the sentence patterns for investigation were relatively limited,and one study usually focused on one sentence pattern for discussion.There was hardly comprehensive study on the distribution of various sentence structures in the corpus over a chronological time.This thesis mainly explores three questions: 1)How does the mean length of utterance develop in early stage for Mandarin-speaking children and how does it relate to the development of sentence construction? 2)At what age are different special sentence constructions first produced? What is the distribution tendency and progressive characteristics of each construction types in different age? 3)Which acquisition theory are validated by the result of the early development of sentence construction?This thesis was based on a case study,which recorded the development of a Mandarin-speaking child’s early stage of sentence construction development by means of recording and diary keeping.Referring to Liu Yuehua’s Classification in Practical Modern Chinese Grammar,this thesis made a comparative analysis from the perspectives of MLU and the special sentence construction,in order to describe in detail the characteristics of the development of sentence construction in Mandarin-speaking children’s early stage,as well as to make contributions to the current acquisition theories.The results showed that:(a)The mean length of utterance increased smoothly with age.On average,it took about 6 months for children to add one word to each sentence except a rapid leap from one year and five months to one year and nine months.(b)Among all the materials collected during the longitudinal research,the proportion of special sentence construction increased with time,and the diversity increased gradually as well.And the number of special sentence construction even surpassed that of simple sentences during the ages 2:10 to 2:11 for the first time.In addition,special simple sentences not only outnumbered complex sentences,but also surpassed complex sentences in initial production time.Furthermore,the corpus showed there were also differences in the number change and acquisition speed of various special sentence constructions.The grammatical structure was gradually standardized from conjunction-omission.And the semantic content of each sentence pattern developed from single intention to rich meaning expression.(c)The features of children’s early development of sentence construction fairly support the Usage-based theory.Through recording a child’s early utterance corpus development and analyzing his speech in natural settings,this thesis was devoted to describing the trend and characteristics of children’s sentence construction development comprehensively and specifically.Consequently,the findings provide authentic evidence for the usage-based theory,and enrich the existing research results of sentence construction acquisition. |
