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Temporal reference in Chinese mother–child conversation: morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic resources

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2000

CHIUNG-CHIH HUANG
Affiliation:
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Tunghai University

Abstract

This paper explores two Mandarin-speaking children's (3;2 and 3;3) ability to refer to the past in mother–child conversation. The approach encompasses morphosyntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic perspectives. The results show that the children tend to refer to immediate past spontaneously, but rely heavily on elicitation when referring to earlier past. It is suggested that maternal scaffolding functions as a discourse support for children to participate in conversation involving earlier past. When establishing past reference with overt temporal markers, the children resort mainly to aspect markers. In addition, they also rely on semantic and discourse-pragmatic resources for temporal inferencing, such as inherent semantic aspect, shared background knowledge and situational context.

Type
NOTE
Copyright
© 2000 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I would like to express my appreciation to the participating families for their kindly support. I would also like to thank Roger Andersen, Terry Au, John Schumann, Noriko Akatsuka and the two anonymous reviewers for insightful comments. An earlier version of this paper has been presented in November 1998 at the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development and has appeared in the proceedings.