The Development of the Verb Category and Verb Argument Structures in Mandarin-speaking Children

before two years of age

Ling XIAO[1], Xin CAI[1] and Thomas Hun-tak LEE[2,1]

[1] INSTITUTE OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE, HUNAN UNIVERSITY

[2] LANGUAGE ACQUISITION LAB, CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG

1. Theoretical background

A number of usage-based studies by Tomasello and his colleagues have

argued against the existence of the verb as a syntactic category in the early

grammatical development of children, viewing children's multi-word

combinations as instances of item-based constructions (Tomasello 1992, 1999,

2000, 2003; Lieven, Pine and Barnes 1992, Lieven, Pine and Baldwin 1997).

The alleged absence of the verb category has been supported by evidence

showing the paucity of verbs serving as arguments of other operators in

multi-verb sentences. Tomasello (1992: 251) argues that paradigmatic classes

are defined according to syntagmatic criteria. Therefore, nouns can form a

category once they become arguments of verbs; however, verb-like elements

may not form a category unless they themselves become arguments of higher

predicates such as verbs in complementation structures. Since such complex

structures are not productive in early word combinations, as shown in the

longitudinal study of Tomasello (1992), the verb category is said to be absent

Ling Xiao, Cai, Xin and Lee, Thomas Hun-tak. 2006. The development of the verb category and verb argument structures before two years of age. In Proceedings of the Seventh Tokyo Conference on Psycholinguistics, ed. Yukio Otsu, 299-322. Tokyo: Hituzi Syobo.

before two years of age.

These scholars have also argued against early availability of the verb

category in language acquisition by showing that different verbs have

non-overlapping cooccurrence patterns and lexical specificity effects. Lieven

and her colleagues have analyzed how verbs cooccur with inflectional endings

and auxiliary verbs in English-speaking children aged between 1 year 3 months

and 2 year 7 months (Pine, Lieven and Rowland 1998). They report a low

degree of overlap in the verbs which inflectional endings attach to, and in the

verbs which auxiliary verbs combine with. This raises the possibility that

inflectional endings are attached to specific verbs rather than to an abstract

category. Lexical specificity effects are said to support the view that children at

this stage are operating with limited scope patterns defined by frequency

distributions rather than an abstract verb category. This view is also supported

by studies showing that children between two and three years of age produce

different inflected forms of a verb (different forms of the verb go) at different

proportional frequencies, which vary according to the syntactic contexts they

occur in (Theakston, Lieven, Pine and Rowland 2002).

Besides arguing against the availability of syntactic categories, usage-based

psycholinguists have also advocated the view that early syntactic development is

gradual and piecemeal. Children's sentences at a given point evolve in minimal

steps from earlier sentences with the same verb by means of domain-general

operations such as substitution, expansion, addition, and coordination1. Based on

data from his daughter for the period 18 to 20 months, Tomasello (1992: 236-7)

reports that 92% of the first 271 three-or-more-word combinations of the child

involved only a single simple change from previous sentences with the same

verb. In particular, as a consequence of this piecemeal development, reordering

of elements in a sentence is considered to be a rare operation.

The above usage-based studies are difficult to reconcile with a rich set of

studies documenting the emergence of inflectional and complementizer

categories, as well as the correlation of finiteness with word order, in children

before two years of age (Whitman, Lee and Lust 1991; Deprez and Pierce 1993,

Poeppel and Wexler 1993; Wexler 1993, 1998). These studies are also at odds

with other studies showing young children's sensitivity to abstract principles of

Universal Grammar (Otsu 1981; Crain and Nakayama 1987, Crain 1991); if

children did not have knowledge of major syntactic categories by two years of age,

attainment of knowledge of structure dependence or island conditions at three or

four years of age would be a mystery. In addition, the usage-based accounts

conflict with recent studies showing the robustness of distributional regularities of

grammatical categories available in the language input to children. As shown by

Mintz, Newport and Bever (1995, 2002) and Mintz (2003), groups of words

identified by frequent frames based on neighboring words (one word to the left

and one word to the right of the target word) correspond well to the word classes

defined by adult linguistic criteria. If distributional bootstrapping is deemed a

plausible strategy for mapping words to syntactic categories such as nouns and

verbs, one should not expect the acquisition of the verb category to be a

protracted process.

2. Aims of the study In this paper, we critically evaluate the usage-based view by examining the

longitudinal grammatical development of two children growing up in Changsha,

Hunan, acquiring a southern variety of Mandarin as their native language, from

one to two years of age. Like Beijing Mandarin, the southern Mandarin spoken in

Changsha is impoverished in morphology, and syntactic categories are defined

almost exclusively by means of syntactic distribution rather than morphological

marking.

First, we demonstrate that the verb category exists by showing that

distributional bootstrapping is a viable mechanism for tuning in to the

distributions of major syntactic categories in the target language such as nouns,

verbs, and adjectives. Following the method of Mintz (2003), we analyzed the

frequent frames of the adult input to the children to see if there was a good fit

between the intervening words identified by frequent frames and adult word

classes as defined by linguistic criteria. We then examined the frequent frames

and the intervening words of such frames in child production, and compare them

to those in the adult input to see whether the two sets of frames and intervening

words matched each other.

Second, we show that a significant proportion of early verbs of children

serve as arguments to other operators, contrary to the claims of Tomasello. We

analyzed the multi-verb utterances of the children that occurred in negative and

interrogative contexts, as well as utterances in which verbs served as

complements to modal verbs, aspectual verbs or matrix verbs. Utterances in

which verbs appeared as the second verb of [V V] compounds were also

identified.

Finally, we show that early syntactic acquisition is not a gradual, piecemeal

process with a detailed analysis of the verb-argument structures of the two

subjects. We traced the use of each verb used by the children and the sentence

frames it occurred from one session to the next, to determine for each session

how many verbs appeared for the first time, how many sentence frames were

introduced for the first time, and how many first-use verbs occurred in first-use

frames.

3. Data for analysis The data consisted of 20 sessions each of hourly audio- and audio-visual

recordings for two children growing up in Changsha, acquiring a variety of

Southern Mandarin and exposed to other Hunan dialects. The children were

observed for more than a year beginning from around 10 months of age. The

data used for distributional analysis covered the period 01;02;22 to 02;00;26 for

one child AJR, and 01;03;14 to 02;00;19 for the other child, LSY. Since children

did not enter the two word stage until 18 months old, the data used for verb

argument analysis began from one and a half and ended at around 2 years old,

with 13 sessions of data for AJR and 11 sessions for LSY.

4. Method and results on distributional analysis

4.1 Method for distributional analysis Following Mintz (2003), we extracted every sequence of three adjoining

words from each utterance. In each such sequence, the intervening word was the

target and the neighboring words were considered as the frame, i.e. the linguistic

environment of the target word. Here, we carried out two types of frame analysis.

One type of frame analysis excluded initial and final utterance boundaries from

frames, as in Mintz (2003). In addition, different from Mintz (2003), we did an

analysis of frames which included utterance-initial and utterance-final

boundaries. Before frame analysis was carried out, word boundary symbols were

inserted into utterances. The criteria for a Chinese word were based on the

proposals of Zhu (1982), Lü (1980) and Xia (2002), which included criteria such

as minimal free form, expandability, versatility and compositionality.

Our frequent frame analysis was carried out on the adult input to the two

subjects for utterances with two or more words. The frequency of each frame, as

well as that of each intervening word in the frames, was recorded. In this

analysis, a subset of all frames whose frequency reached 15 or more were

considered as frequent frames. Then we extended the frequent frame analyses to

the speech of the two children at two years of age, for utterances containing two

or more words. With respect to frames in children’s production, those whose

frequency reached 3 or more were considered as frequent frames since the

number of children's utterances was far less than that of the adults.

In order to assess how well frequent frames identify syntactic categories, two

quantitative measures of categorization were used. One is an accuracy score

calculated for each frequent frame. The intervening words of each frequent

frame were assigned category labels according to adult linguistic criteria. To

compute the accuracy score for each frame, all possible pairs of words in the

category were compared. Each pair was classified as a hit or false alarm. A hit

was recorded when two words were from the same syntactic category. And a

false alarm was recorded when two items were from different syntactic

categories. Accuracy measures the proportions of hits to the number of hits plus

false alarms, maximum accuracy being 1. In addition, a prominence score was

calculated for each frequent frame. For each cluster of intervening words

identified by a frequent frame, the category label that occurred most frequently,

in terms of both type and token, was taken as the prominent category of the

frame. Prominence measures the ratio of the number of words in the cluster that

belong to the prominent category to the number of words in the cluster. This

measure indicates the degree to which a salient category was identified by a

frequent frame. Next, the frequent frames in the adult input were compared to

those of children’s production with respect to the number and percentage of

overlapping frames, the number and percentage of overlapping intervening

words, and accuracy and prominence scores.

4.2 Results on distributional analysis Our data show that distributional analysis based on frequent frames of

neighboring words can pick out the distributional properties of major word

classes in Chinese, as seen from accuracy and prominence measures.

Table 1. Number of utterances, words and frames in the adult input Number of frames Subject Number of

utterances Number of words (type (token))

Frames (w_w)

Frames (w_w, #_w and w_#)

AJR 12734 2303 (46646) 11197 13281 LSY 9403 1965 (38369) 9842 11547

Table 2. Number of frequent frames and intervening words

in frequent frames in the adult input Number of frequent frames Number of intervening words

(type (token)) Subject

Frames(w_w)

Frames (w_w, #_w and w_#)

Frames (w_w)

Frames (w_w, #_w and w_#)

AJR 128 390 560 (4015) 1432 (20163) LSY 131 311 512 (4370) 1335 (15889)

Table 1 gives the statistics for the number of utterances, words and frames in

the frame analysis of the adult input. Table 2 shows the number of frequent

frames and intervening words. In the frequent frame analysis excluding

utterance boundaries, 128 and 131 frequent frames were found in the adult input

to the two children, containing 560 and 512 intervening words respectively.

These frequent frames constituted less than 3% of all frames, and covered up to

23% to 26% of all types of words in each dataset. In the frame analysis

including utterance boundaries, 390 and 311 frequent frames were found for the

children taking up 2.9% and 2.7% of all frame types in each dataset. The

intervening words identified by the frequent frames contained 1432 and 1335

words for the two subjects, covering 62% and 68% of all types of words in the

data. These figures suggest that frequent frames could be an effective cue for

syntactic category information, since a relatively small number of

high-frequency linguistic environments (less than 3% of the frames) will permit

the learner to categorize about one-quarter of the words in the input.

Turning to the accuracy and prominence scores of the frequent frames in the

adult input to the children, as can be seen from Table 3, if utterance boundaries

were excluded from frames, the mean accuracy scores ranged from 0.68 to 0.71

for frequent frames overall, and ranged from 0.74 to 0.83 for frequent frames

that picked out verbs and adjectives as prominent categories. With respect to

mean prominence scores, these ranged from 0.7 to 0.75 for frequent frames

overall and from 0.86 to 0.91 for frequent frames whose prominent categories

were verbs and adjectives. These values on the whole reflect a good fit between

clusters of words identified by frequent frames and word classes based on

linguistic criteria. The accuracy and prominence scores were generally reduced

for the frame analysis which included utterance boundaries, reflecting

inadequacies in relying on distributional analysis alone. The mean accuracy

scores ranged from 0.51 to 0.53 for frequent frames overall, and ranged from

0.61 to 0.82 for frequent frames that identified verbs and adjectives as prominent

categories. As regards mean prominence scores, these varied between 0.6 and

0.65 for frequent frames overall and between 0.73 and 0.91 for frequent frames

that had verbs and adjectives as prominent categories.

With respect to the results on frequent frames in the children's production,

Table 4 shows that the mean accuracy scores ranged from 0.57 to 0.73 for

frequent frames overall, and varied between 0.66 and 1 for the frequent frames

whose prominent categories were verbs and adjectives. The mean prominence

scores ranged from 0.64 to 0.8 for frequent frames taken as a whole, and ranged

from 0.75 to 1 for the frequent frames which yielded verbs and adjectives as

prominent categories. The results show individual variation between the two

children, as the mean accuracy and prominence scores revealed a better

correspondence between the word clusters identified by frequent frames and

those defined by adult criteria for AJR than for LSY.

Table 3. Accuracy and prominence score of frequent frames in the adult input (types)

Mean accuracy score of all frequent

frames

Mean prominence score of all frequent

frames

Mean accuracy score of frequent frames

yielding verb and adjective

Mean prominence score of frequent

frames yielding verb and adjective

Subject

Frame (w_w)

Frame (w_w, #_w and w_#)

Frame (w_w)

Frame (w_w, #_w and w_#)

Prominent category

yielded by frequent frames

Frame (w_w)

Frame (w_w, #_w and w_#)

Frame (w_w)

Frame (w_w, #_w and w_#)

Verb 0.74 0.73 0.91 0.76AJR

0.71 0.51 0.75 0.65 Adjective 0.77 0.63 0.88 0.73

Verb 0.83 0.61 0.86 0.75LSY

0.68 0.53 0.70 0.60Adjective 0.82 0.82 0.89 0.91

Table 4. Accuracy score and prominence score of frequent frames in children’s production (types)

Subject Mean accuracy score of all

frequent frames

Mean prominence score of all

frequent frames

Prominent category yielded by frequent

frames

Mean accuracy score of frequent frames yielding

verb and adjective

Mean prominence score of frequent

frames yielding verb and adjective

Verb 0.82 0.91AJR

0.73 0.8Adjective 0.66 0.75

Verb 0.74 0.86LSY

0.57 0.64Adjective 1 1

Examples of the frequent frames in the adult input are given in Table 5 and

Table 6, which give the intervening words for the frequent frames whose

prominent categories are verbs and adjectives, for the analysis in which sentence

boundaries were excluded.

Table 5. Examples of frequent frames in the adult input to AJR (w_w)

Frequent frames

Intervening words (number of tokens) Prominent category of intervening words

bu_le “not_particle”

yao “want to have”(8)，wan “play(5), qu “go” (3), tiaowu “dance”(3), xi “wash”(3), tiao “jump”(3), hua “draw”(2), jide “remember”(2), jiang “speak”(2), jiao “call”(2), kai “open”(2), yun “dizzy”(2), ying “win”(2), ren “recognize”(1), shua “wash”(1), ting “listen”(1), tou “cast”(1), xihan “like”(1), zhong “hit target”(1), zhuan “turn” (1), zuo “sit”(1), guang “take charge of “(1), hao “good” (1), he “drink”(1), kan “look”(1), lai “come”(1).

verb

hao_de “very_particle”

zang “dirty”(22), ku “cool”(8), leng “cold”(7), piaoliang “beautiful”(7), guai “well behave”(3), duo “much”(3), kuai “fast”(3), yonggan “brave”(2), yuan “far”(2), kexi “pity” (2), lihai “shrewd”(2), shen “deep”(2), ying “hard”(1), gan “dry”(1), gaoxing “happy”(1), hei “black”(1), jiu “for a long time”(1), le “particle”(1), nengan “crackerjack”(1), nuli “work-hard”(1), nuanhuo “warm”(1), pa “afraid”(1), qingliang “cool”(1), re “hot” (1), tian “sweet”(1), zhuang “contain”(1)

adjective

To obtain a qualitative understanding of the relationship between the

frequent frames and intervening words of the adult input and those of the

children's production, we identified the frequent frames that occurred in both the

adult input and the child speech.

Table 6. Examples of frequent frames in the adult input to LSY (w_w)

Frequent frames Intervening words (number of tokens) Prominent category of intervening words

zai_shenme “be_what”

gan “do” (31), chi “eat” (5), he “drink” (2), hua “draw” (2), chang “sing” (1), kai “open” (1), kan “look” (1), shuo “talk” (1), tuo “drag” (1), wan “play” (1), xia “come down” (1), zhao “look for” (1).

verb

tai_le “too_particle”

xiao “small” (6), meng “impetuous” (2), cao “noisy” (2), chang “long” (1), da “big” (1), tiaopi “naughty” (1), duan “short” (1), duo “much” (1), gao “high” (1), hao “good” (1), kuai “fast” (1), lihai “shrewd” (1), pi “naughty” (1), xinku “tired” (1), youmo “humorous” (1),

adjective

For each overlapping frequent frame, we observed the intervening words

that occurred in both the adult input and the child production. The percentage of

the overlapping frequent frames in relation to the total number of frequent

frames in the children's speech was calculated. Similarly, the percentage of

intervening words in relation to the total number of intervening words in the

child production was calculated. It was found that between 81 and 85 frequent

frames of the two children at two years of age overlapped with the frequent

frames of the adult input covering the period prior to two years of age,

constituting 83-84% of the frequent frames in the children's production. When

the overlapping intervening words were considered, it was found that the mean

percentage of overlapping intervening words in relation to the total number of

intervening words in a frequent frame in the children's production was 67% for

one child and 61% for the other.

The above figures suggest a close fit between the frequent frames of the

children and those of the adults, pointing to the success of children's using

distributional information in the adult input to acquire the distributional

properties of syntactic categories in the target language. On the other hand, the

data also show that the children are acquiring not just the frequent frames and

their intervening words as purely probabilistic relations, since on average only

about two thirds of the intervening words in a frequent frame of the child

production come from the adult input. This can be taken as an indication that the

children are not just remembering lexically-based patterns, but have extended

the prominent categories identified by distributional properties to other lexical

items than those that appeared in the adult frequent frames. In the context of our

discussion, children have established the formal categories of verbs and

adjectives on the basis of input.

5. Method and results for verb-argument development

5.1 Method for analyzing verb-argument structures In this section, we examine the development of the verb category and the

verb argument structure of the two subjects from the very onset of two-word

stage to two years. In order to see whether the early verbs of children function as

arguments to other operators, we noted the occurrence of verbs in negative and

interrogative sentences, in sentences with modal verbs, aspectual verbs or main

verbs taking a verb complement, and in sentence with VV compounds. To

understand whether early syntactic development reflects a gradual and

piecemeal process based purely on simple, domain-general cognitive operations,

as claimed by the usage-based researchers, or reflects the use of complex

linguistic operations, we traced the development of each verb used by the two

children and the sentence frames that it occurred in.

A sentence frame is the set of thematic roles a verb co-occurs with, taking

word order into account. The thematic roles are meant to be heuristic labels

based on adult classification. The labels include Agent, Theme, Patient,

Experiencer and Location, the semantically based category of Adverbial

Modifier, as well as closed-class categories such as negator, aspectual marker

and sentence final particle. For the convenience of analysis, we considered all

the sentences in the child production containing the same verb as belonging to

the same verb chain. For each verb chain, we began with the first occurrence of

the verb and noted its sentence frame. We then observed how the sentence

frames of the verb evolved from one session to the next, to see whether the

changes reflected simple, single cognitive operations such as substitution,

expansion, addition, coordination, occurring one at a time, or more complicated

operations.

If the child produced a word combination in which a word seemed to occupy

the same position of another word or word combination in an earlier utterance of

the same verb chain, this would be considered as an instance of substitution. The

element to be replaced could be a noun phrase or a complement of a verb.

If the child produced an utterance in which a word seemed to be an expanded

form of a constituent in the same position in an earlier utterance of the same

verb chain, involving the adding of a modifier to a bare noun, or the addition of

a complement or an aspectual marker to a verb, this would be considered a case

of expansion. If the child uttered an utterance containing a constituent which

seemed to be an addition to an early utterance of the same verb chain, then this

will be regarded as a case of addition. If the child produced an utterance which

seemed to be the integration of two previously produced combinations

belonging to the same verb chain or distinct verb chains, this would be

considered an instance of coordination.

In addition to examining the changes of sentence frames of individual verbs

in terms of substitution, expansion, addition and coordination, we paid special

attention to the first occurrence of each verb and the sentence frames the verb

occurred in. To facilitate discussion of our analysis of verb argument

development, we adopted the following classification of verb uses according to

whether these occurred for the first time in the data. A verb which had not

occurred in previous sessions was called a first-use verb. Such a verb initiated a

verb chain. A verb which had occurred in previous sessions was called a

prior-use verb. Similarly, if a verb occurred in a sentence frame that had not

been produced in earlier sessions, the frame was classified as a first-use frame; if

a verb occurred in a sentence frame that had been produced in a previous session,

it was considered as a prior-use frame.

5.2 Results on early verb-argument structure

The early verbs of children occur as arguments to other operators, contrary

to Tomasello, as can be seen from Table 7, which gives information on negated

verbs, complement verbs and VV compounds. In general, only few verbs were

recorded in interrogative sentences containing wh-phrases or the A-not-A

question operator (0 for AJR and 6 for LSY), and these numbers were not

included in the table.

Table 7. Number of verbs occurring in negative sentences, in sentences with verb complements and in [V V] compounds*

Subject Number of I

Number of II

Number of III

Number of IV

Number and

percentage of V

AJR 134 24 28 18 (13) 61 (45.5%)

LSY 170 52 25 29 (20) 87 (51.2%)

I =verbs, including adjectives; II =verbs (types), occurring in negative utterances; III =verbs (types) occurring as complements to matrix verbs, including existential, modal and aspectual verbs; IV =verbs (types) occurring as V2 in [V1V2] compounds; V =verbs (types) occurring as argument of other operator *Examples of different types of sentences are as follows: negative utterance: buyao (not want), meiyou qu (not go); verb complements: hui hua (can draw), yao mama lai (want mommy come), you wenzi guo (exist mosquito pass) , qu wan (go play); [V V] compounds in which the second verb was also used independently: qie-kai (cut-open); na-xialai (take-down), da-po (beat-broken).

The data show clearly that both children used verbs as a semantic argument

of the negator, existential, modal and aspectual verbs, as well as other matrix

verbs. The total verb lexicon of the two children in the period from one and a

half years to two years old varied in size from 134 to 170. Between 61 and 87

of their verbs, constituting 46 to 51 percent of their verb lexicons, were used as

arguments of other operators. In addition, around 70% of the second verbs in the

[V V] compounds of the two children were also used as independent predicates

in other utterances, suggesting that these verbs were functioning as complements

to the first verb in the [V V] compounds.

The development of verb-argument structure did not simply involve

domain-general cognitive operations such as expansion, addition and

coordination. Adopting Tomasello’s method, we examined all the multi-word

utterances of our subjects during the observation period to check whether these

so-called symbolic integration operations were sufficient to account for

children’s early syntax. During the observation period, AJR and LSY produced

249 and 299 utterances with three or more words respectively. As can be seen

from Table 8, only between 47 and 52 percent of the sentence frames first used

with a verb involved repetition of a previous sentence frame or a single

operation. On the other hand, between 48 and 53 percent of the sentence frames

first used with a verb involved two or more changes from prior sentence frames

used with the verb, or were frames that could not be traced to any previous

sentence frames for the verb. These figures are much higher than the 8%

reported by Tomasello for his subject. This suggests that the children were in

command of sentence frames as abstract structures and were able to apply

structures acquired for a particular verb to other verbs. Examples of sentence

frames of a verb that involved two or more putative changes from previous

sentences of the same verb chain, or were frames that could not be traced to

previous sentences of the same verb chain, are given in (1-4).

Table 8. Changes in the sentence frames of verbs in verb chains for utterances with three or more words

Number of changes from previous sentence in the same verb chain

AJR LSY

Repetition of previous sentence in the same verb chain 56 66

One change from previous sentence in the same verb chain 73 75

Subtotal 129 (51.8%)

141 (47.2%)

Two changes from previous sentence in the same verb chain 56 53

Three or more changes from previous sentence in the same verb chain

18 52

No previous sentence in the same verb chain 46 53

Subtotal 120 (48.2%)

158 (52.8%)

(1) LSY: qu Aiwan (01;06;13)

go Aiwan pavilion

"Go to Aiwan pavilion"

LSY: pingguo na qu? (01;08;02)

apple where go

"Where did the apple go?"

In (1), for LSY to produce pingguo na qu ("apple where go?"), one may say that

he had previously mastered the sentence frame [Location __ ] for the verb qu

("go"); then he could simply add a Theme before the frame to produce the more

complex sentence frame [Theme Location __ ]. However, LSY had only uttered

qu aiwan ("go Aiwan pavilion") in the sentence frame [ __ Location] before

pingguo na qu. Thus, the child had to first move the Location NP to the

preverbal position and then add the Theme pingguo before it. Two changes

would thus be needed for this development, and re-ordering would be necessary,

as shown in (2).

(2) Step 1: Reordering: [ __Location] → [Location __ ]

Step 2: Addition: [Location__ ] → [Theme Location __ ]

Even more operations would be needed for the construction of some other

utterances if one were to follow Tomasello's model. One may consider a

sentence such as (3), produced by LSY, as originating from earlier sentences as

given in (4). Two prior sentence frames of the verb hua "draw" were [ __

Instrument] and [ __ Location]. To arrive at the utterance in (3), the child would

first have to rearrange the order of the Instrument, and then negate the verb; he

would also have to coordinate these two thematic roles into a single utterance.

A possible scenario for this development is given in (5).

(3) LSY: hongse bi mei hua qiangshang (01;10;10)

Red pen not draw wall

"(I) did not use the red pen to draw on the wall"

(4) LSY hua dabing (01;07;11)

draw biscuit

"Draw biscuit"

LSY hua zhege bi (01;08;16)

draw this pen

"Draw with this pen"

(5) Step 1: Reordering : [_ Instrument] →[Instrument _ ]

Step 2: Addition: [Instrument _ ] → [Instrument Neg _ ]

Step 3: Coordination: [Instrument Neg _ ] + [ _ Location]

→ [Instrument Neg _ Location]

The development of verb argument structures in the two children reflects not

just the simple operations of substitution, expansion, addition and coordination,

but also the operations of reordering, by which two constituents are interchanged

in position, omission of constituents as well as substitution of verb phrase, in

which a verb or verb phrase was replaced by another verb or verb phrase in a

complement position or in a serial verb construction. Examples are given in (6).

(6) LSY: xihuan kanshu (01;09;26)

enjoy read-book

"(I) enjoy reading books"

LSY: xihuan nian AB (01;10;10)

enjoy say AB

"(I) enjoy reading AB"

Tomasello argues that the preservation of word order within constituents is

one of the most prominent characteristics of children’s symbolic integration

operations. This is said to indicate that what children are doing at the highest

level is concatenating symbolic structures in a very straightforward way via

mental combinations (Tomasello 1992: 237). This is not true of our data, in

which reordering appeared to be a salient operation. LSY rearranged the

positions of two constituents 21 times, in sentences containing verbs such as kan

("look"), kanjian ("see"), hua ("draw"), nian ("read") and pa ("fear").

The fact that the development of verb argument structures is not a piecemeal

process is also evidenced by the high number of verbs used for the first time in

sentence frames that had not been used previously. Table 9 shows that first-use

verbs occurred in first-use frames rather than prior-use frames for about 40-50%

of the time. Further, if one examines the first-use verbs occurring in first-use

sentence frames, the sentence frames that contained more than one constituent

outnumbered those that contained just one constituent by a ratio of

approximately 2 to 1. The results indicate that either first-use verbs shared the

same sentence frame with other previously used verbs, or they began with

complex first-use sentence frames at their first appearance. This is a further

indication that children's early syntax was not a piecemeal development from

earlier word combinations.

Table 9. Sentence frames for first-use verbs*

Number of first-use verbs in prior-use sentence frames

Number of first-use verbs in first-use sentence frames

Subjects

sentence frames with one

constituent

sentence frames with more than one constituent

sentence frames with

one constituent

sentence frames with more than one constituent

AJR 41 31 13 34

Subtotal 72 (61%) 47 (39%)

LSY 67 23 22 68

Subtotal 90 (50%) 90 (50%) *A first-use verb may occur both in sentence frames with one constituent and in sentence

frames with more than one constituent in the session. A first-use verb may occur both in prior-use frames and first-use frames in the same session. Repetitions of the same verb in the same sentence frame were not counted.

If one observes the percentage of use of first-use verbs across sessions, the

number of verbs that were used for the first time outnumbered those that had

appeared in previous sessions, for the period 01;06 to 01;08. Thereafter, the

reverse trend was observed. Every session revealed evidence of some verbs used

for the first time in first-use sentence frames. The number of first-use verbs

appearing in first-use sentence frames exceeded that of first-use verbs appearing

in prior-use frames in 40% of the sessions.

Examples of first-use verbs appearing in prior-use frames and first-use

frames are given in (7-8). The sentence frame [_ Patient] was first produced at

the age of 01;06;17 with the verb diao ("fish"). AJR then produced the verb ti

("kick") at the age of 01;10;16 in this sentence frame. In (8), the verb zai

("be/at") was first produced by LSY at the age of 01;07;16 in the first-use

sentence frame [ __ Location], which had not been used previously with any

other verb.

(7) AJR: diao yu (01;06;17)

fish fish

"(Let's go) fishing"

AJR: ti qiu (01;10;16)

kick ball

"(I'm) kicking the ball"

(8) AJR: zai nali (01;07;16)

be there

"(It's) over there"

6. Conclusions and discussion In this paper, based on longitudinal data from two children acquiring a

Southern variety of Mandarin as their native language, covering one to two

years of age, we have found that the children tuned in to the immediately

adjacent linguistic environments of words and made use of these distributional

characteristics to form the categories of verb and adjective, with some degree of

success. The categories formed by children admitted words that were not found

in corresponding adult categories, suggesting that besides using words in

contexts that have been attested in adult input, children also placed words in

linguistic contexts without having seen them so used by adults. Children by two

years of age have formed syntactic categories that reflect the distributional

properties of these categories in the adult language. The fact that children before

two are able to form syntactic categories in conformity with target language

properties is compatible with a bootstrapping account that regards syntactic

categories as substantive universals of Universal Grammar (e.g. the Semantic

Bootstrapping theory of Pinker 1984, 1987).

Children used verbs in negative sentences, in multi-verb sentences as

complements to various kinds of verbs, including existential, aspectual and

modals verbs, and as the second verb in [V V] compounds. More than 45% of

the verbs in the verb lexicon of each child occurred as an argument of some

operator, contrary to the claims of Tomasello (1992). Such productive use argues

for children's ability to use verbs as arguments of higher predicates, and points

to the availability rather than the absence of the verb category.

Finally, our detailed analysis of argument structure development before the

age of two has demonstrated that early syntactic acquisition is not a gradual,

piecemeal process, contrary to the claims of usage-based accounts. About half of

the children's sentence frames evolved from earlier sentences with the same verb

by means of more than two operations such as substitution, expansion, addition,

coordination or reordering. Children would use verbs for the first time in

sentence frames with more than one constituent, whether these had been used

with other verbs. This ability to begin using a verb in complex structures reflects

a syntactic predisposition to handle constituent structure, as well as operations

such as category-general substitution and reordering.

In demonstrating the existence of a verb category before two years of age,

our study also confirms early studies that argue for early sensitivity to syntactic

category distinctions (Valian 1986, Bloom 1990). Our study also confirms

reports on children acquiring Beijing Mandarin as their native language, which

point to early use of reordering operations and early occurrence of functional

categories in Chinese (Xiao 2004, Zhang et al 2005).

Notes

* We are indebted to various members of the Hunan Chinese Early Language

Acquisition group who contributed to the recording of LSY and AJR, and the

transcription of the recordings: Ai Zhaoyang, Zeng Tao, Huang Aijun, Chen Min,

Chen Feiyan, Liao Hui and Yang Jie. Thanks are also due to Wang Hao for his

technical support in distributional analysis. We thank Ning Chunyan for his

staunch support of acquisition research at Hunan University. We are grateful to

helpful comments from the participants of TCP2006. This research was

supported by two grants to Thomas Lee, a Research Grants Council grant (CityU

1245/02H), and a faculty start-up grant of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 1 Examples from Tomasello (1992: 230-235) included the following:

Substitution: 'drink water' > 'drink milk'; Expansion: 'lock-it' > 'lock that Lulu';

Addition: 'hit tennis' > 'Danny hit tennis', 'Maria made' > 'Maria made this

duck'; Coordination: 'Maria hit. Hit me.' > 'Maria hit me'.

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