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Acquisition of the polarity sensitive item renhe ‘any’ in Mandarin Chinese*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2013

AIJUN HUANG  and
STEPHEN CRAIN
AIJUN HUANG*
Affiliation:
Soochow University, China and Macquarie University, Australia
STEPHEN CRAIN
Affiliation:
Macquarie University, Australia
*
Address for correspondence: Aijun Huang, School of Foreign Languages, Soochow University, Jiangu Province, China. e-mail: ajhuang@suda.edu.cn
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Abstract

The present study investigated Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of the polarity sensitive item renhe ‘any’ in Mandarin Chinese. Like its English counterpart any, renhe can be used as a negative polarity item (NPI), or as a free choice (FC) item, and both the distribution and interpretation of renhe are governed by the same syntactic and semantic constraints as English any. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task, the present study tested five-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of FC renhe in sentences containing the modal word neng ‘can’, and tested children's comprehension of NPI renhe in sentences containing the temporal conjunction zai…zhiqian ‘before’. Most children demonstrated knowledge of the interpretation of both FC renhe and NPI renhe despite a paucity of relevant adult input. Like adults, however, Mandarin-speaking children do not use renhe frequently in ordinary conversation, due to the availability of alternative colloquial expressions (wh-pronouns) that also convey children's intended meanings.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , July 2014 , pp. 861 - 889
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

This project was supported, in part, by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders (CE110001021) <http://www.ccd.edu.au>, and by the Macquarie University Research Excellence Scholarships (MQRES). We would thank Nobuaki Akagi, Francesco-Alessio Ursini, Likan Zhan, Peng Zhou, Patrick Chu, and especially Thomas Hun-tak Lee and Rosalind Thornton for their valuable comments and useful suggestions as this work progressed. Some of the findings from the present paper were presented at the Fifth International Conference on Formal Linguistics (ICFL 5) and Beijing Language and Culture University (BLCU). We would like to thank the audience on these occasions for their questions and comments. We would also express our sincere thanks to Liqun Gao and his students for their assistance in conducting the experiments in BLCU. We are also grateful for Thomas Hun-tak Lee for giving permission to access to the BJCELA corpus, and Margaret Ka-yan Lei, Xiawei Duan, and Xiaoxu Zhang for their help in searching the longitudinal data in this corpus.

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