| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立嘉義大學 === 外國語言學系研究所 === 100 === Motion events are situations depicted or expressed with moving objects or entities. Talmy (1985, 2000) suggested the two-way split between verb-framed languages and satellite-framed languages to classify cross-languages. In the view of language development, children's performance in language production and comprehension is constrained by specific properties from an early age on. Chinese presented a challenge on the typology of motion events. In recent year, most acquisition studies are experimental (Guo & Chen, 2005; Lin, 2006; Chen & Guo, 2009); this study is corpus-based one instead. The present study aims to study Chinese motion events and data from spontaneous utterances of children of 1- to 5-years-old. The data are from three sources: First, transcripts of children of 1- to 3-years-old are from HTC01 in TCCM; second, fourteen children of 4- to 5-years-old are from Chang (2005) in CHILDES; and third, another four data are from children of Taiwanese parents in Kuo’s (2006, 2009) projects of Eastern-Asia immigrants. The results of the present study showed that first, Chinese-speaking children’s motion event expressions do not increase with growing age, yet children use single-element structure in early age and they produce each construction with even percentage as growing older. Second, Path was the most productive motion elements. Manner and path were significant for Chinese-speakers in encoding motion events. The preferred construction among Chinese-speaking children was path construction. The results reveal that Chinese-spontaneous motion events are more like Verb-framed language, unlike what is found in controlled elicitation tasks.
|
|---|
