The development of aspectual marking in child Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

ABSTRACTCross-linguistic research on the development of tense-aspect marking has revealed a strong effect of lexical aspect. But the degree of this effect varies across languages. Explanation for this universal tendency and language-specific variation is still an open issue. This study investigates the early emergence and subsequent development of four grammatical aspect markers in Mandarin, -le(perfective),zai(progressive), -zhe(durative), and -guo(experiential), in the longitudinal speech data of four children acquiring Mandarin Chinese. It was found that the emergence of grammatical aspect marking generally follows the predictions of the aspect hypothesis, perfective -lepredominantly appearing with telic verbs, whereas progressivezaiis almost exclusively used with activity verbs. However, the typological features of Mandarin also affect the early uses of -le, which is used with stative predicates more frequently than predicted, and the input patterns play an important role in children's aspect marking. The results support a usage-based learning process in accord with a language-specific system of aspectual semantics, rather than a strong universal association of grammatical aspect and lexical aspect.