Distributionally constrained items in child language: the acquisition of superweak NPI shenme ‘a/some’ in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

This paper presents new experimental results obtained from 88 Mandarin speaking children (2; 11 -4; 09; M = 3; 11; SD = 0; 6; 44 girls) in their acquisition of shenme 'a/some', a prototypical superweak Negative Polarity Item (NPI) that survives in nonveridical contexts only (cf. Lin Jing et al. 2014). The existence of NPIs like shenme leads to a learnability problem. Without being confronted with negative evidence, such as corrective feedback or explicit instructions on shenme's ungrammaticality in contexts that are not nonveridical, how can children detect shenme's distributional constraint? By analysing children's performance in an elicited imitation task, this paper investigates the learnability of the superweak NPI in Mandarin Chinese. The results suggest a learning process in which Mandarin children initially analyse shenme as a mere wh-quantifier and reanalyse it as a referentially deficient quantifier later on. The wh-analysis gives rise to a distribution of shenme in wh-questions only, whereas the non-referential analysis generates shenme's distribution in the whole array of nonveridical contexts. The investigation of the acquisition of the Mandarin NPI shenme shows that children are able to acquire distributionally constrained items in the absence of negative evidence: they start out with a strict assumption (i.e. the wh-analysis) and switch to a less strict and generalising analysis (i.e. the non-referential analysis) later on.

Distributionally restricted items

“…First of all, these expressions, although they may appear to be unrelated at first sight, have all been categorised as NPIs in the literature (see e.g. Ladusaw 1979Ladusaw , 1996Kadmon and Landman 1993;Krifka 1995;Horn 1996Horn , 2000Horn , 2005 for any; see Zwarts 1981Zwarts , 1986Zwarts , 1995van der Wouden 1997; among others for hoeven; see for instance Cheng 1994Cheng , 1995Lin 1996Lin , 1998Lin 2017 for shenme). However, there are differences in terms of both their licensing contexts, and their functions or meanings when appearing in different kinds of negative contexts.…”