CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Motivation
Research on the performance of Mandarin complex sentences has primarily conducted to investigate how adults comprehend or produce the complex structures based on experiments, corpus or discourse in terms of the sentence types. Of the three types of complex sentences, the structure with relative clauses (RCs) has drawn much attention. All the studies on this clause type are of experiment, aiming to explore how adults perceive RCs as well as how they deal with the processing difficulties brought by the garden path when an RC modifies the object of a main clause, yet none of the studies examined the production (Chen et al., 2008; Hsiao & Gibson, 2003; Lin &
Bever, 2006). Unlike the comparative abundance of literature allied to adults’
performance of Mandarin RCs, there was only one study on complement clauses (CCs), which was discourse corpus-based, hence, the production-focused (Huang, 2003). Likewise, research on adverbial clauses (ACs) has been done to tackle with the production, either via corpus (Wong, 2005) or discourse collected from different occasions (Wang, 1996, 1999, 2002, 2006).
Regarding acquisition, the performance of Mandarin complex sentences has even hardly been delved, except for the complex structure with RCs. Within the studies on RCs, considerable concern has arisen over both comprehension and production (Chang, 1984; Cheng, 1995; Chiu, 1996; Hsu, 2006; Su, 2004, 2006).
Although these experimental studies showed inconsistent results, they presented insightful discussions. Nevertheless, it appears that no research findings are yet
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available concerning the acquisition of Mandarin CCs and ACs, let alone the comparison of the development of the complex sentences. As a matter of fact, there exists literature on the issue of how children develop the three complex sentence structures; however, the literature, which was corpus-based, has been concerned about English acquisition and has emerged only in a slowly and scattered way (Diessel, 2004; Limber, 1973).
As Chomsky (1959, 1965) has proposed, children adopt language acquisition device that is common to all human languages to make sense of the utterances heard around them. Therefore, it is expected that children are able to detect the characteristics shared by the three types of complex sentences and acquire them in a similar way during acquisition. Since each type of complex sentences consists of a subordinate clause and a main clause, the impacts brought by where the subordinate clause positions to its main clause may be similar. This relative position between the two clauses is defined by the branching direction. When a complex sentence comprises a subordinate clause positioning to the left of a main clause, it is called a left-branching sentence, as in (1a), (2a) and (3a). On the contrary, a complex sentence with a subordinate clause positioning to the right of a main clause, it is a right-branching sentence, as in (1b), (2b) and (3b). The impacts of the right-branching direction on acquiring complex sentences could be predicted by the proposal that the consistency of the branching direction between complex structures and the nature basic syntax of the language causes less processing difficulties (Bever, 1970;
Goodluck, 1991). Mandarin, according to Huang (1982) and Lust & Chien (1984), is essentially considered as a left-branching language in that its major recursive structures, e.g., RCs and ACs, located to the left of their head or matrix sentence are unmarked. An apparent example is that an RC (e.g., nage nusheng chi de) is placed
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before its head (e.g., pingguo), as shown in (1). The unmarked branching direction suggests that despite the complex sentence types, the left-branching complex sentences should be easier to process than the right-branching complex sentences.
(1) a. Left-branching RC
[[RC Nage nusheng chi de] pingguo] dadao xiaogou.
that girl eat DE apple hit puppy
‘The apple which that girl ate hit the puppy.’
b. Right-branching RC
Nage nusheng xihuan [[RC pingguo dadao de] xiaogou].
that girl like apple hit DE puppy
‘That girl likes the puppy which the apple hit.’
(2) a. Left-branching CC
[CC Milaoshu chuan qunzi] bu heshi.
Mickey Mouse wear skirt not appropriate
‘It is not appropriate for Mickey Mouse to wear a skirt.’
b. Right-branching CC
Wo kanjian [CC Milaoshu chuan qunzi].
I see Mickey Mouse wear skirt
‘I saw that Mickey Mouse wore a skirt.’
(3) a. Left-branching AC
[AC Ruguo Milaoshu kan dianshi dehua], ta jiu hui chi baomihua.
if Mickey Mouse watch television in case he then will eat popcorn
‘If Mickey Mouse watches television, then he will eat popcorn.’
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b. Right-branching AC
Milaoshu hui chi baomihua, [AC ruguo ta kan dianshi dehua].
Mickey Mouse will eat popcorn if he watch television in case
‘Mickey Mouse will eat popcorn if he watches television.’
In the existing research on Mandarin RC acquisition, the effect of the branching direction on comprehension and production has been explored. To be specific, it has been shown that an RC in the left-branching position of a main clause is easier than that in the right-branching, that is, center-embedded, position of a main clause in comprehension (Chang, 1984; Cheng, 1995; Chiu, 1996), a finding which accords with the proposal that complex structures located in a right-branching position in a left-branching language would cause difficulties, and vice versa (Bever, 1970; Dryer, 1992; Goodluck, 1991). Nevertheless, in production, no branching direction effect has been found (Hsu, 2006). The left- and right-branching structures also exist in the other two complex sentence types, CCs and ACs; however, as has been outlined earlier, little is known about how children acquire the two complex sentence types. This motivates us to wonder (i) if the branching direction is also a factor that influences children’s acquisition of CCs and ACs.
Despite the similarity that each complex sentence type bears both left- and right-branching structures, the linguistic properties of CCs, RCs and ACs are not identical. CCs, which are syntactically embedded clauses, function as arguments of the matrix clause predicates. Nevertheless, RCs, which are also syntactically embedded, function as modifiers of their heads in subject or object positions of matrix clauses. Like RCs, ACs, which are adjuncts, function as modifiers of an associated main clause or a verb phrase. These distinct attributes may give rise to diverse acquisition order of the three complex sentence types, an issue that seems not to
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receive much attention. Accordingly, (ii) how the three complex sentence types in Mandarin are acquired in order becomes one of our interests.
In addition to the branching directions and the constructions of the complex sentences, the asymmetry between the comprehension and production may provide a view of how well the complex sentences are acquired. As MacDonald (2000) has claimed, the processes of comprehension and production differ; therefore, the performance of the two different tasks may not be the same. Since the non-linguistic planning for content as well as the integration between the message and the syntactic structure in production (Bock and Levelt, 1994) cause much more difficulties for young children than the comprehension process does (Mcdaniel et al., 2010), the production may lag behind the comprehension. However, for adults or children who have acquired a construction, the production may reflect their competence; in other words, they may produce equally well as they comprehend the construction or they may produce even better than they comprehend. This invokes our interests of investigating (iii) how the comprehension and production of complex sentences differ in acquisition.
In relation to the comprehension and production, how the complex sentences are acquired differently in the two tasks is another issue worth exploring. Take comprehension of the complex sentences as an example. The same word sequences of the first few words may lead to similar difficulties in acquisition in spite of the complex sentence types. As proposed by Bever (1970), in an SVO language, any Noun-Verb-Noun (NVN) sequence within a potential internal unit in the surface structure corresponding to actor-action-object (SVO) is easier to comprehend.
Grounded on this claim, owing to the fact that the unmarked word order in Mandarin is SVO, the first NVN sequence which matches the SVO word order should result in
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less processing burden in comprehension, regardless of the types of complex sentences. As shown in (4), (5) and (6), repeated from (1), (2) and (3), the first NVN sequences formed in the complex sentences with CCs and RCs1 may or may not match the SVO word order, while those formed in the complex sentences with ACs always match. The preference of SVO word order would then suggest that complex sentences like (4a) and (5a) be easier than complex sentences like (4b) and (5b).
However, complex sentences like (6a) and (6b) are equally easy due to the same word sequence.2
(4) a. Left-branching RC
[[RC Nage nusheng chi de] pingguo] dadao xiaogou.
that girl eat DE apple hit puppy
N V N V N
S V O
‘The apple which that girl ate hit the puppy.’
1 The RCs used in (1) and (4) are all object-extracted RCs. Only the object-extracted RCs in both left-branching and right-left-branching positions will result in the same word sequence for the first three words, namely, NVN, but different word order, namely, SVO and SVS. There is the other type of RCs, that is, the subject-extracted RCs, yet this RC type does not give rise to the NVN sequence, and hence is not considered in the present chapter. For more details about the acquisition of the RC types, please see the discussion in Chapter Three.
2 Notice that the RC marker de and the subordinators in ACs may serve as a cue in the comprehension.
As claimed by Hsiao and Gibson (2003), the RC marker de, like the other lexical items, helps a listener to predict the incomplete head-dependencies that require his storage resources. Lin and Bever (2006) also proposed that when comprehending a relative clause, a listener would not construct the filler-gap relations of the relative clause until the RC marker de and the head nouns are reached. In addition, Hawkins (1994) has argued that the emergence of the subordinator of an AC tells a listener that the sentence they are dealing with is a complex sentence. Even though both the RC marker de and the subordinators in ACs indeed play important roles in the comprehension, these words, compared to the nouns and verbs, are less prominent for children since children may pay more attention to the content words rather than the function words. Accordingly, this dissertation mainly takes the NVN-schema hypothesis into consideration and leaves the detailed discussions of the RC marker de and the subordinators in ACs for future research.
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b. Right-branching RC
Nage nusheng xihuan [[RC pingguo dadao de] xiaogou].
that girl like apple hit DE puppy
N V N V N
S V S
‘That girl likes the puppy which the apple hit.’
(5) a. Left-branching CC
[CC Milaoshu chuan qunzi] bu heshi.
Mickey Mouse wear skirt not appropriate
N V N V
S V O
‘It is not appropriate for Mickey Mouse to wear a skirt.’
b. Right-branching CC
Wo kanjian [CC Milaoshu chuan qunzi].
I see Mickey Mouse wear skirt
N V N V N
S V S
‘I saw that Mickey Mouse wore a skirt.’
(6) a. Left-branching AC
[AC Ruguo Milaoshu kan dianshi dehua], ta jiu hui chi baomihua.
if Mickey Mouse watch television in case he then will eat popcorn
N V N N V N
S V O
‘If Mickey Mouse watches television, then he will eat popcorn.’
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b. Right-branching AC
Milaoshu hui chi baomihua, [AC ruguo ta kan dianshi dehua].
Mickey Mouse will eat popcorn if he watch television in case
N V N N V N
S V O
‘Mickey Mouse will eat popcorn if he watches television.’
Previous studies relevant to RCs have shown that there indeed exists the preference of basic word order during comprehension (Su, 2006). When a hearer encounters a NVN sequence that does not match the SVO basic word order as in (4b), he will first interpret the subject of the RC as the object of the main clause and need a reanalysis when he finds out that he has wrongly interpreted the sentence, which means more processing efforts and hence processing difficulties. This has inspired us to suspect (iv) if the comprehension and production of complex sentences will be affected by some factors, e.g., the NVN sequence, other than the branching direction.
Apart from the dearth of studies on acquisition of Mandarin CCs and ACs, the development of acquiring Mandarin complex sentences have not yet been explained via a theory in which the universality, continuity and learnability have been taken into consideration. It is well known that children are equipped with an innate template for language, that is, Universal Grammar (UG). The considerable similarity in the way grammatical patterns are acquired across different children and languages suggests that there must be a set of innate principles and adjustable parameters that are universal to all human languages. Additionally, the continuity, which means that every child grammar is a possible human grammar, is a core concept in acquisition (Goodluck, 2010). Nevertheless, the child’s grammar may deviate from that of the language he is acquiring. By correcting the errors that have been made, the child will
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ultimately acquire the language. In other words, there must be a developmental process that links the child grammar and the adult grammar. This process entails that grammars are learnable. These three concepts, namely, universality, continuity and learnability, have been so intrinsic in language acquisition that we wonder (v) if the theory, Optimality Theory (OT), which regards these concepts as essential properties, can account for the acquisition of complex sentences.
In view of little research on the acquisition of Mandarin complex sentences and the need of a theory that can account for the performance of the complex sentences, the purpose of the current dissertation is to investigate how Mandarin-speaking children of different age comprehend and produce the complex sentences, including CCs, RCs and ACs, as well as to make certain if the grammar at each stage can be captured by OT, which sees the continuity, learnability and universality as essential properties.