汉语空间语言特征及儿童方位词短语的习得  

Properties of Spatial Language in Mandarin Chinese and the Acquisition of Localizer Phrases

作　　者：邓湘君 DENG Xiangjun(College of IntermationalStudies,Shenzhen University)

机构地区：[1]深圳大学外国语学院

出　　处：《当代语言学》2024年第4期558-577,共20页Contemporary Linguistics

基　　金：深圳大学项目“汉语空间表达的儿童语言习得”(860-000002110184)。

摘　　要：本研究从跨语言和儿童语言的视角考察汉语空间语言。汉英空间语言有一些共性和个性:空间短语的生成规则一致,有相同的层级结构,均涉及所有格;但空间短语中的名词在两种语言中的词汇化方式不同,空间短语各层级核心是否有语音实现在两种语言中也有不同。此外,空间轴向信息在英语中由名词、介词表达,在汉语中只由方位词表达,方位词是名词还是后置词有理论争议。基于跨语言比较,本研究考察2-6岁汉语普通话儿童方位词短语的习得。实验显示,2岁多儿童已可生成含假词的方位词短语,证实了具有语言普遍性的空间短语生成规则较早习得。另一方面,一些5岁儿童在实验中仍错误地省略普通名词后的方位词;许多6岁儿童尚未认识到表示地点的专有名词后不可接“里”这一限制。这些习得困难应是由汉语方位词短语中名词独特的词汇化方式带来的。此外,儿童使用“名词短语+的+双音节方位词”这类方位词短语的频率远远高于不含“的”的方位词短语,由于“的”后可接名词(而不是后置词),该结果支持双音节方位词是名词的观点(Li1990;Huang等2009)。汉语母语者倾向于将参照物及其轴向方位之间的关系视为表领属的所有格关系,支持了Svenonius(2010)基于其他语言得出的空间短语中含格范畴这一结论。本文表明,用儿童语言的证据来证实某一理论分析具备可行性。This study investigates spatial language in Mandarin Chinese from cross-linguistic and child language perspectives.Comparing the spatial language in Mandarin and English reveals some important commonalities and differences:both languages share the same rule in generating spatial phrases(SPs),and their SPs share the same hierarchical structure and involve genitive case;but the two languages differ in the lexicalization of nouns that form SPs,as well as in whether the head at each level of the hierarchical structure has phonetic realization.Moreover,spatial axial part information is lexicalized into prepositions or nouns in English,but in Chinese,it is lexicalized into localizers whose syntactic category is a much-debated topic with evidence suggesting either a noun or a postposition analysis.Based on the cross-linguistic comparison,this study explores the acquisition of localizer phrases(LPs)amongst Mandarin-speaking children(2-6 years old).Our experiments show that children aged 2 generate new LPs not available in their language input by using novel nouns,thus proving the early acquisition of the LP-formation rule as a language universal.However,some 5-year-olds omit the localizer after the common noun in a non-adult-like way and many 6-year-olds are not sensitive to the constraint that proper names of place cannot be followed by li(里)‘inside',which suggests that the language-specific lexicalization of Chinese nouns that form LPs gives rise to acquisition difficulty.Furthermore,in an elicited production task,children are found to produce far more LPs in the form of‘NP-de-disyllabic localizer'than LPs without de;as de can be followed by a noun instead of a postposition,this pattern confirms the view that disyllabic localizers are represented as nouns in our brain(see Li 1990;Huang et al.2009).It is very likely that native speakers of Chinese perceive the relation between a reference entity and its axial part as that between a possessor and a possessee,lending support to the proposal in Svenonius(2010),that t

关 键 词：空间语言 跨语言比较 方位词短语习得 词类范畴 

分 类 号：H109.4[语言文字—汉语]