Bilingual Children’s Overgeneralisation of the Classifi er ge in Chinese:What is the Role of Caretakers’ Input?

Wu Wanhua and Qi Ruying

Chinese Journal of Language Policy and Planning ›› 2018, Vol. 3 ›› Issue (1) : 78-87.

Welcome to visit Chinese Journal of Language Policy and Planning!
Chinese Journal of Language Policy and Planning ›› 2018, Vol. 3 ›› Issue (1) : 78-87.

Bilingual Children’s Overgeneralisation of the Classifi er ge in Chinese:What is the Role of Caretakers’ Input?

  • Wu Wanhua and Qi Ruying
Author information +
History +

Abstract

Children’s acquisition of specifi c classifiers in classifi er languages (such as Chinese) has received much scholarly attention. In this study, preschool children’s overuse of the general classifi er ge in Mandarin is investigated in order to fi nd out the infl uence of caretakers’ input on young learners’ choice of classifiers. In Chinese, the general classifier ge can be used for a variety of head nouns, yet there are some nouns which grammatically require other specifi c classifiers. Previous studies showed that children’s ‘overgeneralisation’ of ge in Mandarin refl ects a rule-based learning mechanism. Methodologically, the elicitation counting in previous studies ignored the authentic input from caregivers, so it is unclear whether children’s overuse of ge is simply a case of overgeneralisation in acquisition or an outcome caused by other factors such as caretakers’ input. In this study, a corpus of teachers’ and children’s natural conversations are used to analyse the patterns of ge in caretakers’ productions in relation to children’s uses of the classifi er. The corpus includes Mandarin transcripts of weekly recordings of teachers and children in a childcare centre in China, and the participants involved are five teachers, seven English-Mandarin bilingual children and twelve Mandarin monolingual children. The results show that bilingual and monolingual children show similar patterns of overuse of ge, and both teachers and children extend the use of ge for nouns which require specific classifiers, though the rate of teachers’ overuse is signifi cantly lower than that of children. The results suggest that children’s overuse of ge is infl uenced by caretakers’ input as well as rule-based learning. Thus, we propose that the caretakers’ input and children’s rule-based mechanism are two contributing factors for the generalized use of ge for young learners in China.

Key words

classifier / measure word / overgeneralisation / input / bilingual

Cite this article

Download Citations
Wu Wanhua and Qi Ruying. Bilingual Children’s Overgeneralisation of the Classifi er ge in Chinese:What is the Role of Caretakers’ Input?[J]. Chinese Journal of Language Policy and Planning. 2018, 3(1): 78-87

References

方富熹 1985 《4 — 6 岁儿童掌握汉语量词水平的实验研究》,《心理学报》第17 期。
郭先珍 2002 《现代汉语量词用法词典》,北京:语文出版社。
何万顺,林昆翰 2015 《分类词与量词的区分——以台湾地区华语为例》,《汉语学报》第4 期。
吕叔湘 1980 《现代汉语八百词》,北京:商务印书馆。
宋全成 2013 《外国人及港澳台居民在中国大陆的人口社会学分析》,《山东大学学报》(哲学社会科学版)第2期。
应厚昌,陈国鹏,宋正国等 1986 《4—7 岁儿童掌握量词的特点》,《儿童语言发展研究》,朱曼殊,上海:华东师范大学出版社。
Chao, Y. R. 1968. A Grammar of Spoken Chinese. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Cheng, L. L.-S. and R. Sybesma. 1998. Yi-wan tang, yi-ge tang: classifi ers and massifi ers. Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese studies 28 (3), 385-412.
Chien, Y.-C., B. Lust, and C.-P. Chiang. 2003. Chinese children’s comprehension of count-classifi ers and mass-classifi ers. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 12 (2), 91-120.
Del Gobbo, F. 2014. Classifi ers. In C.-T. J. Huang, Y.-H. A. Li, and A. Simpson (eds.), The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics. Somerset: John Wiley & Sons.
Erbaugh, M. S. 1986. Taking stock: the development of Chinese noun classifi ers historically and in young children. In C. Craig (ed.), Noun Classes and Categorization.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: Joln Benjamins.
Erbaugh, M. S. 2006. Chinese classifi ers: their use and acquisition. In P. Li, L. H. Tan, and E. Bates (eds.), The Handbook of East Asian Psycholinguistics (Vol.1). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gao, H. H. 2010. A study of Swedish speakers’ learning of Chinese noun classifi ers. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 33 (02), 197-229.
Gil, D. 2013. Numeral classifi ers. In M. S. Dryer and M. Haspelmath (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
Her, O.-S. 2012. Distinguishing classifi ers and measure words: a mathematical perspective and implications. Lingua 122 (14), 1668-1691.
Her, O.-S. and C.-T. Hsieh. 2010. On the semantic distinction between classifi ers and measure words in Chinese. Language and linguistics 11 (3), 527-551.
Hu, Q. 1993. The acquisition of Chinese classifi ers by young Mandarin-speaking children. PhD dissertation, Boston University.
Huang, C.-R. and K. Ahrens. 2003. Individuals, kinds and events: classifi er coercion of nouns. Language Sciences 25 (4), 353-373.
Lee, T. H.-T. 1996. Theoretical issues in language development and Chinese child language. In C.-T. James Huang and Y.-H. Audrey Li (eds.), New Horizons in Chinese Linguistics.
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Li, C. N. and S. A. Thompson. 1981. Mandarin Chinese: A Functional Reference Grammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Li, P., Barner, D. and B. H. Huang. 2008. Classifi ers as count syntax: individuation and measurement in the acquisition of Mandarin Chinese. Language Learning and Development 4 (4), 249-290.
Li, P., B. Huang, and Y. Hsiao. 2010. Learning that classifi ers count: Mandarin-speaking children’s acquisition of sortal and mensural classifiers. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 19
(3), 207-230.
Li, W. and S. Lee. 2001. L1 development in an L2 environment: the use of Cantonese classifi ers and quantifi ers by young British-born Chinese in Tyneside. International Journal of
Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 4 (6), 359-382.
Loke, K. K. 1991. A semantic analysis of young children’s use of Mandarin shape classifi ers. In A. Kwan-Terry (ed.), Child Language Development in Singapore and Malaysia. Singapore: Singapore University Press.
MacWhinney, B. 2000. The CHILDES Project: Tools for Analyzing Talk (3rd ed.). Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Myers, J. 2000. Rules vs. analogy in Mandarin classifi er selection. Language and Linguistics 1 (2), 187-209
Myers, J., S.-P. Gong, Z.-G. Shen, et al. 1999. The semantic content of the general classifi er in Mandarin. Paper Presented at the International Association of Chinese Linguistics
Eighth Annual Conference, Melbourne, Australia.
Pinker, S. 1997. Words and rules in the human brain. Nature 387 (6633), 547.
Qi, R. 2011. The Bilingual Acquisition of English and Mandarin: Chinese Children in Australia. New York: Cambria Press.
Qi, R. and W. Wu. 2015. Input and acquisition of Mandarin classifi ers by English-Mandarin bilingual children in China. China Language Strategies 1, 86-106.
Szeto, K.-S. 1998. The acquisition of Cantonese classifi ers. MPhil dissertation, The University of Hong Kong.
Tai, J. 1994. Chinese classifi er systems and human categorization. In M. Chen and O. Tzeng (eds.), In honor of William S.-Y. Wang: Interdisciplinary studies on language and language change. Taiwan: Pyramid Publishing Company.
Tai, J. and L. Wang. 1990. A semantic study of the classifi er tiao. Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association 25 (1),35-56.
Tse, S. K., H. Li, and S. O. Leung. 2007. The acquisition of Cantonese classifi ers by preschool children in Hong Kong. Journal of Child Language 34 (03), 495-517.

Accesses

Citation

Detail

Sections
Recommended

/