汉语儿童对量词和否定词辖域关系的认识-外国语言学及应用语言学专业论文.docxVIP

Engli English Abstract II II Abstract The research on quantifier scope ambiguity has been a hot issue in linguistics. Quantifier and negation interact with each other to produce scope ambiguity. Based on this point, three investigations with the picture verification method and the truth value judgment task were conducted to account for Chinese children’s interpretation through the comparison between adults and children. Mei-pi ma dou mei-you tiao - guo liba every-CL horse all not-have jump-over fence Every horse didn’t jump over the fence According to the current literature, the Chinese quantified sentences like the above are unambiguous in adult grammar, which can only be interpreted as “none of the horses jump over the fence”(isomorphic interpretation), contrary to children’s interpretation and their ambiguous English counterparts, which also allow the interpretation that “some, not all of the horses jumped over the fence” (non-isomorphic interpretation). The present research includes two sentence types: sentence type 1, “mei CL N dou bu VP (every NP not V N)”; sentences type 2, “bushi mei CL N dou VP (not every NP V N)”. Specifically, two questions were examined: (i) Whether or not Chinese-speaking children have adult-like knowledge of the restrictions on the interpretation of quantified sentences like the above, which are unambiguous for adults. (ii) If they do have the adult-like knowledge, it is in accordance with the Continuity Hypothesis. If not, how to resolve the learnability problem (or what is the inner mechanism for children to converge on the adult grammar). The results (from Experiment 1 and Experiment 2) showed that both the adults and children accept its isomorphic and non-isomorphic interpretation, but adults always have the preference for the isomorphic interpretation as children do in sentence type 1. However, children have no preference in sentence type 2 by accepting both of the two interpretations. Experiment 3 aims to study the reason for chi