Aspect
and modality of the ba and bei constructions
in
child Mandarin
Deng
Xiangjun
Shenzhen
University
Abstract
This study examines the ba and bei constructions in Mandarin
using data from the Tong corpus, a new multimedia longitudinal child language
corpus. A unified aspectual account of the two constructions is proposed: both require
telic predicates, and should thus correlate with the perfective rather than
imperfective aspect for learners. Analysis of corpus and diary data reveals
that Tong is generally sensitive to the telic requirement when he begins to use
the two constructions around 2;0. His ba and
bei sentences occur far more frequently in
perfective than
imperfective aspect, consistent with the Aspect Hypothesis. However, while the
majority of the child’s bei
passives are perfective, the majority of his ba
sentences are aspectless, among which most are irrealis
(imperatives, modal sentences, etc.). The difference mirrors the pattern in
adult input. These findings are corroborated by additional child Mandarin
corpora. The acquisition of the aspectual properties of the ba
and bei constructions is influenced
by inherent knowledge, input and language-specific features of Mandarin,
consistent with the multi-factorial account proposed by Shirai
(1991, 1998) and Chen & Shirai (2010).
About the Speaker
Deng Xiangjun
is an assistant professor
at the School of Foreign Languages in Shenzhen University and a researcher at
the Research Centre for Language and Cognition at Shenzhen University. She was
recognized by Shenzhen Municipality as Overseas
High-Caliber Personnel (Peacock Plan). Her research interests include child
language acquisition, Chinese syntax and semantics, corpus linguistics,
comparative linguistics and psycholinguistics. She has published articles in Linguistics
and Journal of Chinese Linguistics. Some recent research will appear
in
Journal of Child Language and First
Language. In 2016, she published a
multimedia longitudinal child Mandarin Corpus, the Tong Corpus, on Child
Language Data Exchange System
(CHILDES) in
collaboration with Prof. Virginia Yip at the Chinese
University of Hong Kong.
Processing of prosodic
focal information in a
second language:
Evidence from eye
movement in the Visual World
Paradigm
Ge
Haoyan
Open
University of Hong Kong
Abstract
This
‘visual-world’ eye-tracking study
investigates how Cantonese L2 learners of English use prosodic information in
the processing of focus in English. Focus in English is typically realized by
assigning prosodic prominence to the focal element. Different prosodic
placement triggers different interpretations of a sentence with the focus
particle only and affects its truth-condition
(Jackendoff, 1972; Rooth,
1992), as in (1). By contrast, the use of prosody to realize focus in Cantonese
is confined to duration- and intensity-related cues. Rather, Cantonese uses
focus particles and varies word order to achieve the same purpose.
(1)
a. The dinosaur is only
carrying the BUCKET. (object focus)
b. The dinosaur is only CARRYING
the bucket. (verb focus)
Forty Cantonese L2 learners of English and
forty native speakers of English participated in this study. They heard English
only-sentences with prosodic
prominence on either the object or the verb while looking at four pictures, with
their eye movements being recorded.
A post-test task was conducted to examine whether participants are sensitive to
the placement of prosody in speech perception.
The results revealed anticipatory
eye-movements to the alternatives of focus in native controls based on the
presence of prosody, whereas Cantonese L2 learners’ eye movements were similar
across conditions regardless of the placement of prosody. In the acoustic perception
task, Cantonese L2 learners showed similar accuracy and even shorter reaction
times than native controls. The findings suggest that while Cantonese L2
learners are sensitive to prosodic information, they have difficulty in
integrating prosodic cues and into semantic parsing of focus.
Ge Haoyan
is a Research Assistant
Professor at the School of Education and Languages at the Open University of
Hong Kong. She received her MPhil and PhD in Linguistics from the Chinese
University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include bilingual child
language acquisition, second language acquisition, psycholinguistics and corpus
linguistics. She uses a number of research paradigms in her work, including
eye-tracking and corpus methods. Her work has appeared in international
academic journals such as First Language and
Studies on Prosodic Grammar. She was a
visiting researcher in the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS at the Utrecht
University and an active member of Childhood Bilingualism Research Centre at
the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has obtained Administering and Coding
Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule 2 (ADOS-2) for clinical and research
reliability.
汉英母语者和汉语失语症患者在长阅读中的
眼动特征及其临床参考
陆
烁 罗琴芹
中山大学
摘要
本研究采用Eyelink 1000plus眼动仪，以25名汉语母语者、20名英语母语者及7名汉语失语症患者为被试，通过文本阅读任务考察汉语失语症患者的阅读障碍眼动表征。实验设计难、易两种类型的说明文阅读任务，考察三组被试间在总阅读时长、平均注视点时长、回视百分比、眼跳数量和平均眼跳幅度等参数上的眼动表现差异，结果发现：1）时长方面，三组被试间平均trail阅读时长存在显著差异（p＜0.001），其中汉语母语者用时最短，而失语症患者最长；但在平均注视点的时长上，汉语失语症患者表现出显著更长的趋势（p=0.01），而汉英母语者间无显著差异；2）注视点数量方面，各组间均存在trail平均数量上的显著差异（p=0.003），其中汉语母语者最少，而失语症患者最多；在英语文本根据单词、汉语文本根据语言学意义上的词汇进行兴趣区划分后，发现三组被试在兴趣区平均注视点数量上同样存在显著差异（p＜0.001），其数量趋势与trail平均注视点一致；另外，在无注视点兴趣区的比例上，三组被试间也存在显著差异（p＜0.001），汉语母语者的比例更大，而失语症患者最小；3）眼跳方面，三组被试间在向右眼跳幅度上存在显著差异（p＜0.001），汉语母语者幅度最大，失语症患者最小；在回视比值上，汉语语言显著高于英语（p＜0.001），而汉语内部则呈现边缘显著的特点（p=0.081）；4）兴趣区内注视点位置方面，在忽略同一行文本的注视点可能出现的上下浮动后，考察三组被试在兴趣区横轴上距离中心的偏离度，发现汉语内部无显著差异（p=0.521），而汉语的偏离度显著大于英语（p＜0.001）。
本研究揭示了汉英母语者在文本阅读中的不同眼动模式，主要体现在汉语母语者有更强的以词组而非单词为阅读加工单位的倾向，汉语母语者的阅读知觉广度可能更高，但是也带来了信息获取遗漏的概率增加（更高的回视比例）。正常人与失语症患者的阅读眼动模式进行对比发现，失语症患者阅读能力受损后，虽然带来注视时长的显著增加，但是不会改变其原本的以词组为加工单位的阅读模式。本文的发现将有助于对语言能力受损者的异于常人的阅读模式进行界定，为汉语阅读障碍精准筛查与定级，以及康复训练提供重要参考。
主讲人简介
陆烁，女，1983年生。中山大学中国语言文学系副教授，中山大学神经语言学教学实验室副主任，香港中文大学语言学及现代语言系兼职研究员。先后就读于北京大学中文系（本科、硕士）、香港城市大学（博士）。先后主持国家社科基金青年项目、教育部人文社科基金青年项目、广州市科技项目等。
汉语焦点小品词的儿童语言习得
吴
庄
广东外语外贸大学
摘要
焦点小品词（Focus
particles）也叫做焦点敏感算子（Focus sensitive operators），如英语中的“only”、“also”、“even”和汉语中的“只”、“也/还”、“都/才/就”等。传统语言学一般把焦点小品词看作副词。但与一般的副词不同，这类词语与句子中的对比焦点（即最凸显的信息）相关联，表达焦点成分与语境中的其他事物之间的关系。比如，在有小兔子和小鸭子的语境中，“只有小兔子吃了香蕉”表示“小鸭子没吃香蕉”，因此“只”被称为排他性焦点小品词（Exclusive
focus particle）；“小兔子也吃了香蕉”则表达“小鸭子吃了香蕉”，因此“也”是添加性的焦点小品词（Additive
focus particle）；而“小兔子都吃了香蕉”不仅表达“小鸭子吃了香蕉”，还隐含“在小兔子和小鸭子两者中，小兔子是最不可能吃香蕉的”，因而“都”是等级性的焦点小品词（Scalar
focus particle）。焦点小品词的理解涉及句法、音系和语用等多个模块的语言知识以及这些模块之间的互动，为我们观察儿童语言能力的发展，特别是接口知识（Interface
knowledge）的习得提供了很好的窗口。本次讲座中我们将报告一系列对于汉语儿童理解不同焦点小品词的实验研究，结果将表明儿童很早就掌握了焦点小品词的相关语言知识，但他们会因为在加工对比项方面存在困难而与成人之间表现出差异。
主讲人简介
吴庄，广东外语外贸大学英语语言文化学院副教授、云山青年学者、硕士生导师。2009年于北京语言大学获得博士学位，2010-2012年在香港中文大学语言学及现代语言系做博士后研究。主要研究方向为语言习得。主持完成国家社科基金项目、教育部人文社科基金项目、全国基础教育外语教学研究资助金项目等课题10项，在《外语教学与研究》、《外国语》、《现代外语》、《语言教学与研究》等刊物发表论文20余篇，出版专著1部。2010年被确定为湖南省青年骨干教师培养对象，2014年入选广东省优秀青年教师培养计划。
The covert dependency
in Mandarin wh-questions—Evidence from
self-paced reading studies
Yang
Yang, Leticia Pablos,
Lisa Cheng
Guangdong
University of Foreign Studies
Abstract
Wh-question
words in
Mandarin remain in-situ at their base position, different from wh-movement
languages like English in which wh-words are
fronted to sentence initial position (Spec-CP).
In processing a wh-movement
question, when the wh-word
(filler) is encountered, the parser actively looks for its base position (gap)
and establishes an overt dependency. Nevertheless, for wh-in-situ
questions like Chinese,
where there is no overt (non-local) dependency, little is known about how
exactly an in-situ wh-word
is processed. Although theoretical studies have proposed that the wh-word
in
Chinese is licensed by the interrogative operator (Q) at Spec-CP or Co,
and obtains the interrogative quantificational force, constructing a covert
dependency between the in-situ wh-word and
the interrogative operator, little is known whether
there is any processing evidence for such a covert dependency in in-situ
questions. To answer this question and to further understand the processing
mechanism of in-situ questions like Mandarin, we conducted three word-by-word
self-paced reading studies. To be specific, we compared simplex wh-questions
(‘who’)
with their declarative counterparts containing indefinites and complex wh-questions (‘which’) with their
declarative counterparts containing indefinites, given that wh-words
in Mandarin are in
nature indefinites (Cheng, 1991). Our findings show that wh-questions
were in general
processed with more cost/time than their declarative counterparts, which
provides evidence for the parser’s establishment of a covert dependency between
wh-words
and the interrogative operator higher in the clause. Moreover, we find that
complex questions are in general processed with extra cost compared to simplex
questions due to the discourse-linking nature of the wh-phrase
in complex questions.
About the Speaker
Yang Yang
(杨洋) is
currently working as a Yunshan Young Scholar at National Key Research Center
for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign
Studies. She obtained her PhD degree from Leiden University in the Netherlands
in 2018 and her MA degree in General Linguistics and Applied Linguistics from
Shanghai International Studies University in 2013. Yang Yang
has a broad research interest in cross-discipline areas, including
Syntax-Prosody Interface, Psycholinguistics, Autism and Second Language
Acquisition. She is looking forward to collaborating with scholars with
different backgrounds.