A Study On Children’s Acquisition Of Non-interrogative Uses Of “shenme”

The thesis studies children’s acquisition of the non-interrogative uses of the wh-word “shenme”.The researcher adopts a language computational system proposed by Chomsky to test children’s mastery of the licensing conditions applied at syntactic-phonological interface and syntactic-semantic interface to interpret the non-interrogative uses of “shenme”.The researcher firstly employs the Multiple Spell-out proposed by Uriagereka to simulate the derivation of “shenme” processed by the computational system in the grammatical mechanism.Then,the researcher conducts the experiment to analyze the development of children’s comprehension of universal meaning and indefinite meaning of “shenme” and studies their acquisition of the related grammatical knowledge,i.e.semantic licensing conditions and phonetic licensing conditions,etc.Finally,the researcher makes a statistical analysis of the experimental data and arrives at relevant conclusions.In the experiment,the study employs two research methods of Truth Value Judgment Task and Question-Statement Task in the thesis to test 40 children aged 4-6(4;02-6;11)about their interpretation of universal meaning and indefinite meaning of“shenme” under different licensing conditions.The researcher uses the parametric statistics(one-way ANOVA)and non-parametric statistics(Kruskal-Wallis test)to compare the differences between and within groups.According to the results,it is verified that children can apply the acquired grammar into a language computational system to process the interpretation of the meanings of “shenme” and disambiguate the meanings of wh-isostructural sentences.It can also verify the universality of the Continuity Hypothesis in language acquisition.The experimental results show that children at the age of four begin to understand universal meaning and indefinite meaning of “shenme” under different grammatical licensing conditions,and children acquire phonetic licensing conditions earlier than semantic licensing conditions.There is a rapid rising period when children acquire different grammatical licensing conditions of the wh-word.The rapid rising acquisition period of phonetic licensing conditions occurs at the age of 4-5 years(4;01-5;01),and the rapid rising acquisition period of semantic licensing conditions appears at the age of 5-6 years(5;01-6;01).Children after the age of six have acquired a set of adult-like interpretation principles to the meanings of the wh-word.On the whole,children master the universal reading before the indefinite reading.The acquisition order of semantic licensing conditions is as follows: negative domain > uncertain domain > complex negative domain:negation-quantifier scope relation.The acquisition order of the phonetic licensing condition is as follows: intonation > sentence final particles.In addition,the researcher also extracts the linguistic data containing the wh-word “shenme” from 6Mandarin children’s corpora.It is found that the stimuli of non-interrogatives use of“shenme” are far less than that of the interrogative use,which states that children get extremely scarce linguistic materials about universal meaning and indefinite meaning of “shenme”.However,children can still acquire relevant grammatical knowledge continuously.The results of the study provide empirical evidence for the views that children are innate with Universal Grammar and the Continuity Hypothesis in language acquisition is universal.The study comprehensively employs Multiple Spell-out Hypothesis in the language computational system,applies the research achievement of formal linguistics in the study of children’s language acquisition,and provides empirical evidence for universal grammar and the Continuity Hypothesis.Meanwhile,the researcher further explores children’s interpretation of the meanings of “shenme”under different grammatical licensing conditions.The study not only supports Chomsky’s view that “language is a species property of humans”,but also provides a new perspective for future research of language acquisition,which has a certain reference value.