An aspectual account of ba and bei constructions in child Mandarin

Abstract

This study examines the ba and bei constructions in Mandarin using data from the Tong corpus, a new multimedia longitudinal child language corpus. A unified aspectual account of the two constructions is proposed: both require telic predicates, and should thus correlate with the perfective rather than imperfective aspect for learners. Analysis of corpus and diary data reveals that Tong is generally sensitive to the telic requirement when he begins to use the two constructions around 2;0. His ba and bei sentences occur far more frequently in perfective than imperfective aspect, consistent with the Aspect Hypothesis. However, while the majority of the child's bei passives are perfective, the majority of his ba sentences are produced without overt aspect markers, among which most are irrealis (imperatives, modal sentences, etc.). The difference mirrors the pattern in adult input. These findings are corroborated by additional child Mandarin corpora. The acquisition of the aspectual properties of the ba and bei constructions is influenced by inherent knowledge, input and language-specific features of Mandarin, consistent with the multi-factorial account proposed by earlier studies.

A Corpus-Based Study on the Pragmatic Use of the ba Construction in Early Childhood Mandarin Chinese

“…This is good evidence that there may not be a positive correlation between children’s innate linguistic knowledge and age, at least in the present study. According to Li et al (1990) ; Liu (1997) , and Deng et al (2018) , co-occurring verbs in the ba construction normally play an important role in forming ba predicates, and thus we call for future studies to explore children’s acquisition and use of verbs and their ability to produce ba utterances. Another suggested direction for researchers would be to examine how children use pragmatic approaches to ba sentence production, such as replacing, extending, and changing sentence constituents.…”

“…Moreover, the data analysis also suggested that “ba + V + resultative verb complement,” “ba + 给-gei + verb/noun,” and “ba + V + noun (possessive, person, resultative, and partitive)” were the three most frequently used ba sentence forms in the corpus, which is in agreement with Li et al (1990) but differs partially from Wang (2012) . Because the ba construction is mainly correlated with telic events and the perfective aspect in Chinese, most of the children’s ba utterances were used to express result states or locations in their daily speech, which are “typically encoded by a resultative or directional verb complement” ( Deng et al, 2018 , p. 245). For the same reason, it was found that “ba + V + 了-le/着-zhe + verb” was the least used type of ba construction in the corpus; this represented a durative state, such as:…”

“…While semantics relate to the original or ordinary meanings of a word in a language and words that can only be used in certain structures, the pragmatic use of a word can demonstrate various features in a natural discourse context ( Griffiths, 2006 ). In Mandarin Chinese, the ba construction is widely used to present events with temporal properties such as “telicity, boundedness and perceptivity” ( Deng et al, 2018 , p. 244), and has many different pragmatic meanings. Thus, young children need to acquire all the lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic meanings of the ba construction in Mandarin Chinese to express relevant sentences appropriately.…”

“…The ba construction is frequently used by native speakers of Mandarin Chinese. Different from canonical “Subjective-VP-Objective (SVO)” sentences in Mandarin Chinese, the ba construction takes the form of “ba-Object-VP.” It is seen as a unique grammatical pattern by many linguists ( Wang, 1945 ; Liu, 1997 ; Ziegeler, 2000 ; Xu, 2011 ) and researchers of child language development ( Li et al, 1990 ; Deng et al, 2018 ). At the same time, due to its structural peculiarity there is no syntactic pattern corresponding to the ba construction in other languages, especially Western languages such as English ( Wang, 1945 ; van der Lee, 2018 ).…”

The Sequential Unfolding of First Phase Syntax: Tutorial and Applications to Development

“…Although Mandarin is a relatively understudied language (Hsu, 2017), there are already publications indicating that this prediction is correct. Deng, Mai, and Yip (2017) reported that, in the Tong case-study longitudinal corpus, ba first emerged at age 2;2. The vast majority of ba uses were with three predicate types: resultative verb complements, directional verb complements, and locative noun phrase/PP complements.…”