An Shasha, Zhou Peng, Crain Stephen
Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of English Language and Culture, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China.
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2020 Dec 15;11:609492. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.609492. eCollection 2020.
A recent theory provides a unified cross-linguistic analysis of the interpretations that are assigned to expressions for disjunction, Negative Polarity Items, Free Choice Items, and the non-interrogative uses of -phrases in languages such as Mandarin Chinese. If this approach is on the right track, children should be expected to demonstrate similar patterns in the acquisition of these linguistic expressions. Previous research has found that, by age four, children have acquired the knowledge that both the existential indefinite "any" and -words in Mandarin Chinese are interpreted as Negative Polarity Items when they are bound by downward entailing operators, but the same expressions are interpreted as Free Choice Items (with a conjunctive interpretation) when they are bound by deontic modals (Mandarin ) or by the Mandarin adverbial quantifier "all". The present study extends this line of research to the Mandarin disjunction word . A Truth Value Judgment Task was used to investigate the possibility that disjunction phrases that are bound by the adverbial quantifier generate a conjunctive interpretation in the grammars of Mandarin-speaking 4-year-old children. The findings confirmed this prediction. We discuss the implications of the findings for linguistic theory and for language learnability.
最近有一种理论对诸如汉语普通话中用于表示析取、负极性项、自由选择项以及“-短语”非疑问用法的表达式的解释提供了一种统一的跨语言分析。如果这种方法是正确的，那么可以预期儿童在习得这些语言表达式时会表现出相似的模式。先前的研究发现，到四岁时，儿童已经掌握了这样的知识：汉语普通话中的存在性不定代词“any”和“-词”在受向下蕴含算子约束时被解释为负极性项，但当它们受道义情态词（汉语普通话中的“会”）或汉语普通话状语量词“都”约束时，相同的表达式被解释为自由选择项（具有合取解释）。本研究将这一研究方向扩展到汉语普通话的析取词“或者”。使用真值判断任务来探究由状语量词“都”约束的析取短语在说汉语普通话的4岁儿童语法中是否会产生合取解释的可能性。研究结果证实了这一预测。我们讨论了这些发现对语言理论和语言可习得性的意义。
