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In:Studies in Chinese and Japanese Language Acquisition: In honor of Stephen Crain
Edited by Mineharu Nakayama, Yi-ching Su and Aijun Huang
[Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 60] 2017
► pp. 237–264

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Chapter 11
The acquisition of the wh-pronoun duo-shao in child Mandarin

 | Soochow University
 | Jönköping University
Published online: 24 August 2017
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.60.12hua
Abstract
The Mandarin Chinese wh-pronouns ji-ge ‘how many-cl’ and duo-shao ‘a lot-a little’ can be roughly translated in English as ‘how-many’ and ‘how-much’, respectively. When these two wh-pronouns interact with the negation operator mei ‘not’, there derive similar but not identical readings: while the negative ji-ge structure conveys a ‘smallness’ in number (i.e., ‘small-number’), the negative duo-shao structure conveys a ‘smallness’ in quantity (i.e., ‘small-amount’). Huang and Crain (2014a) studied Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of the ‘small-number’ reading of the negative ji-ge structure. It was found that children undergo three developmental stages in the acquisition of the ‘small-number’ reading of the negative ji-ge structure, exhibiting the emergence of the full range of the meanings of ji-ge in the course of language development. The present study extends the inquiry of Huang and Crain (2014a) and investigates the acquisition of the ‘small-amount’ reading of the negative duo-shao structure. The experimental data exhibit two developmental stages, which are argued to reflect the development of the semantic and pragmatic properties of the wh-pronoun duo-shao. In short, the acquisition scenario of the negative duo-shao structure is different from that of the negative ji-ge structure, but both studies suggest that the semantic and pragmatic properties of Chinese wh-pronouns determine the acquisition of Chinese wh-pronouns in negative structures.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Linguistic properties of duo-shao
  • 3.‘Small-amount’ reading of mei…duo-shao
  • 4.Experiment
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2Procedures and materials
    • 4.3The ‘small-amount’ condition
    • 4.4The ‘large-amount’ condition
    • 4.5Results
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (33)
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