省略结构的儿童语言获得研究

Abstract

本文通过实验研究儿童省略结构的获得。本文所讨论的省略结构指的是"也是"结构、"也+情态动词"结构以及空宾结构。这三种结构在汉语生成语法有关的讨论中常常被笼统地称作VP省略结构。本文的研究发现,前两种结构的句法语义表现和英语等语言中的VP省略结构比较相似,因为其解读遵守平行原则,即要求省略部分与先行部分的句法和语义对等;而空宾结构的表现则不怎么像VP省略结构,因为其解读可以不受平行原则的制约。支持这一分析的证据来自我们的实验研究,实验结果显示4岁儿童和成人解读"也是"和"也+情态动词"结构遵守平行原则,而解读空宾结构不受该原则限制。该项研究还发现3岁儿童还不具备区分这三种结构的能力。本文认为这三种结构的解读涉及句法和语义的跨模组运算,而跨模组运算能力的成熟要受到年龄因素的限制,这一研究结果为语法发育论提供了证据。 This paper reports an experimental study investigating Mandarin-speaking children s interpretation of the elliptical constructions such as the ye-shi(也是) construction,the ye(也)-Aux construction and the null object construction(NOC) in Mandarin Chinese.It is argued in the literature of the generative approach that these constructions are VP ellipsis.But it is evident from our study that the first two constructions behave differently from the third one with respect to the observation of the parallelism principle that constrains the interpretation of VP ellipsis． The findings of our study show that the 4-year-old children like adults observe the parallelism principle in their interpretation of the ye-shi and ye-Aux constructions，but not in that of the null object constructions． The 3-year-old children does not make a clear distinction between them. As the ability of the cross-modular syntax-semantics computation involved in the interpretation of the elliptical constructions matures over time, the present findings provide evidence for the maturation hypothesis of language development.