Pseudo-Relatives and Restrictive-Relatives in Child Mandarin

Autor/in	Hsu, Chun-Chieh
Titel	Pseudo-Relatives and Restrictive-Relatives in Child Mandarin
Quelle	In: Journal of Child Language, 50 (2023) 4, S.860-894 (35 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0305-0009
DOI	10.1017/S0305000922000137
Schlagwörter	Mandarin Chinese; Child Language; Phrase Structure; Syntax; Pragmatics; Language Acquisition; Structural Analysis (Linguistics); Preschool Children; Speech Communication + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? 'Children''s language'; Kindersprache; Phrasenstruktur; Pragmalinguistik; Sprachaneignung; Spracherwerb; Structural analysis; Strukturanalyse; Pre-school age; Preschool age; Child; Children; Pre-school education; Preschool education; Vorschulalter; Kind; Kinder; Vorschulkind; Vorschulkinder; Vorschulerziehung; Vorschule
Abstract	This study investigated why object-gap relative clauses (RCs) are dominant in early child Mandarin. We discuss how restrictive-RCs differ from pseudo-RCs syntactically and pragmatically, and examine how these two types of RCs are distributed in the RC utterances of ten children and their caregivers. The results showed that (a) Mandarin-speaking children produce many more pseudo-RCs than restrictive-RCs, (b) restrictive-RCs exhibit a subject-gap advantage and are dominantly headed, and (c) pseudo-RCs exhibit an object-gap advantage and are dominantly headless. We propose that the development of restrictive-RCs is mainly influenced by the structural factor, and that the extensive use of pseudo-RCs is attributed to the communicative needs of young children. Our findings also suggest that young children's pseudo-RCs tend to have a subject-focus reading, and the object-gap dominance observed in the pseudo-RCs of child Mandarin is related to the head-final RCs and the special structural features of the cleft construction in Mandarin. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01