Abstract：Evaluation is one of the key pragmatic proficiency of children, and evaluation expression is an important lens for observing children’s pragmatic development. Based on five typical and relatively highly used evaluative adverbs as samples, this paper attempts to describe the children’s initial acquisition of core semantics and typical functions, as well as the process of calibration, adjustment, expansion and improvement. There five adverbs, namely, yuanlai ‘turn out to be’, fanzheng ‘anyway’, daodi‘after all’, zhenghao ‘by coincidence/fortunately’, mingming ‘obviously/plainly’, were collected through exhaustive extraction from three diachronic corpora. The purpose of this research is to conduct an in-depth and meticulous depiction of the development of children’s evaluation expression in pragmatic performance in a detailed manner. As an abstract grammatical element, evaluative adverbs appear in the early childhood period of 3–4 years old when children start to develop an adult-like language system. At this stage, children’s language system has evolved to a point of performing both conceptual and interpersonal functions, and the evaluative meaning of these adverbs is constructed by children in interaction, transformed in cognition and shaped up in pragmatics. Future research on children’s evaluation expression should be conducted in diverse communicative settings, multiple linguistic functions, and multi-dimensional language education, thus enables us to improve children’s language development, enhance their thinking abilities, and promote their character cultivation.
饶宏泉. 从评价副词的习得看儿童评价表达的发展[J]. 语言战略研究, 2023, 8(3): 35-46.
Rao Hongquan. A Corpus Driven Study on Development of Children’s Evaluative Expression from the Perspective of the Acquisition of Evaluative Adverbs. , 2023, 8(3): 35-46.
