| Verb-resultative Constructions(VRCs),mostly with the patten of a verb+a complement(some scholars regarding De-resultatives as VRCs),are a very important syntactic structure in Mandarin.As a special linguistic phenomenon,its syntactic and semantic relations,and structural complexity have aroused great attention among scholars.Therefore,researchers continuously study on the acquisition of Mandarin VRCs.This thesis takes three semantic orientations of Mandarin VRC’s resultative complements as research objects,and aims to study the acquisition of Mandarin VRCs by Mandarin-speaking children of different ages and high-level Mandarin learners whose mother tongue is English.With regard to first language(L1)acquisition,previous research on Mandarin-speaking children’s VRCs acquisition found that children can produce complex VRCs around 4.5 years old,however no specific empirical research has examined cross-aged children’s acquisition and developmental features of complex syntactic-semantic relations in VRCs.In second language(L2)acquisition,there are a large number of VRCs both in English and Mandarin Although they have similar syntactic forms and semantic structures,there are also many differences between Mandarin and English VRCs.Semantically,it mainly lies in the fact that English VRCs must abide by the Revised Direct Object Restriction(RDOR),conversely Mandarin VRCs are not restricted by it.Therefore,the acquisition of semantic orientations of Mandarin VRC’s resultative complements,especially the ambiguous VRCs,has become a difficult and important point in foreign language teachingThis thesis mainly used empirical research.Based on previous studies,using the grammatical judgment task(GJ task)and multiple forced choice task(MFC task)as research tools,this study attempts to investigate the acquisitional and developmental characteristics of semantic orientations of Mandarin VRC’s resultative complements by three age groups of Mandarin children and high-level Mandarin learners.Moreover,it also verified the accessibility of the internal interface in the Interface Hypothesis as well as the prediction of Interface Vulnerability Hypothesis.In light of the analysis of collected data,the major findings are summarized as follows:(1)The results of this study show that there are age-related differences in the acquisition and development of VRCs by Mandarin children.As children grow up,their cognitive ability improves.Children’s semantic understanding of VRCs is gradually approaching that of adults.(2)High-level Mandarin learners’ interlanguage shows similar characteristics with native speakers in terms of subject orientations and RDOR plays no role in their interlanguage representations,which support the accessibility of the internal interface.However,further analyses show that even for high-level Mandarin learners,the complex internal interface features of Mandarin VRCs’ resultative complements are difficult to be fully acquired.This result is consistent with the prediction of Interface Vulnerability Hypothesis.(3)For both Mandarin children and learners of Mandarin,their acquisition of Mandarin VRCs is variable-dependent rather than domain-wide,variables such as the frequency of input,the complexity of semantic orientations of VRCs,the position of VRCs in their expressions and many others factors may have influence on their full acquisition of Mandarin VRCs. |
