The acquisition of Cantonese classifiers by preschool children in Hong Kong

Abstract

The Cantonese language has a complex classifier system and young learners need to pay attention to both the semantics and syntax of classifiers. This study investigated the repertoire of classifiers produced by 492 Cantonese-speaking preschoolers in three age groups (3;0, 4;0 and 5;0). Spontaneous utterances produced in 30-minute toy-play contexts were collected and transcribed. Analyses identified a productive repertoire of 73 classifiers in the utterances, which could be appropriately classified into the typology proposed in the present study. An age-related increase in the number of classifier types per child as well as the repertoire size of each group was found. 個 go3 (CL) was widely used as the general classifier by the young children. It was also discovered that the three-year-olds were already showing signs of grasping the basic syntax of classifiers. Cognitive, linguistic and contextual influences presumed to shape the evidence are discussed.

Stability in Chinese and Malay heritage languages as a source of divergence

“…It shows that a classifier almost always follows the numeral one in the heritage speakers. The robust presence of classifiers following a numeral is also reported in literature on first language acquisition of classifiers both in Mandarin (Erbaugh 1986;Hu 1993) and in Cantonese Chinese (Tse and Li 2007). The second study conducted by Liu (2013) compares classifier use in one mother and her sixteen-year-old son.…”

“…Erbaugh (1986) shows that replacement by ge is common practice in adult speakers, especially when referring to old information. Both Erbaugh (1986) and Tse et al (2007) note that the first mention of an object often featured a specific classifier, but that later the mention was very often simplified to the general classifier. To summarize we have seen that sortal classifiers are obligatory after numerals in Chinese and absent in the dominant language Dutch, the actual form chosen by speakers is variable and not always predicatale.…”

Tense and temporality

“…The Early Child Cantonese Corpus (ECCC) we established in the past decade (Tse et al, 2002;Tse, Chan, & Li, 2005;Tse, Li, & Leung, 2007) was used in this study. A language corpus can provide data for both qualitative and statistical analysis and may be further analyzed by third parties for multiple purposes.…”

“…The coding system that we have developed and validated in previous studies on early childhood Cantonese (Tse et al, 2002;Tse, Chan, & Li, 2005;Tse, Li, & Leung, 2007) was used in this study. The Cantonese coding system includes the typologies of different lexical forms (nouns, verbs, classifiers, temporal words, aspect markers, adverbs, etc.)…”

“…Although there is a considerable number of studies in the acquisition of Cantonese aspect markers among children with specific language impairment (SLI) (Fletcher, Leonard, Stokes, & Wong, 2005;Luk, 2001;Stokes & Fletcher, 2000Wong, Stokes, & Fletcher, 2003), there is a dearth of large-scale studies of the development of temporality in Cantonesespeaking children. The present study aims to understand the developmental routes of temporality in Cantonese-speaking preschoolers by analyzing the largest corpus of early child Cantonese, the Early Child Cantonese Corpus (ECCC) that we established in the past decade (Tse, Chan, Li & Kwong, 2002;Tse, Chan, & Li, 2005;Tse, Li, & Leung, 2007).…”