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When transparency doesn't mean ease: learning the meaning of resultative verb compounds in Mandarin Chinese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2016

JIDONG CHEN
JIDONG CHEN*
Affiliation:
California State University at Fresno, USA
*
Address for correspondence: Jidong Chen, California State University – Linguistics, 5245 N Backer Ave, PB92 Fresno, CA 93740, United States. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Children have to figure out the lexicalization of meaning components in learning verb semantics (e.g. Behrens, 1998; Gentner, 1982; Tomasello & Brooks, 1998). The meaning of an English state-change verb (e.g. break) is divided into two portions (i.e. cause and result), respectively encoded with a separate verb in a Mandarin resultative verb compound (RVC). The majority of Mandarin monomorphemic verbs do not specify any realization of a state change (like hunt), or only imply it (like wash) (Talmy, 2000). This study examines the acquisition of the constructional meaning of RVCs and the semantic division of labor between the component verbs. Four groups of Mandarin-learning children (aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 6;1) participated in an elicitation experiment. The results reveal that, although transparency in form facilitates their learning of the state-change meanings of RVCs, Mandarin children have difficulties in unpacking the meanings of individual verbs, revealing language-specific learning issues.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 44 , Issue 3 , May 2017 , pp. 695 - 718
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

[*]

This research was supported by a grant from the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Föderung der Wissenschaften and the Provost's award for research release time from the California State University at Fresno. It is dedicated to the memory of Melissa Bowerman, sine qua non. I gratefully acknowledge the cooperation of the child and the adult participants of the study at the Guangzhou Blue-sky Kindergarten, the Kindergarten of the South China Agricultural University, Guangzhou, and Wuhan, China. I also thank Leilei Chen, Meizhen Jiang, Xiaolu Yin, and Ying Zhang for invaluable assistance in recruiting the participants of the study, Shu Lin and Ke Wu for help with statistics, and Penelope Brown and Bhuvana Narasimhan for critical advice and feedback on many aspects of the study. Anonymous JCL reviewers and editors offered helpful comments and suggestions. All of these contributions are acknowledged with grateful thanks. Any remaining errors are solely mine.

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