Contexts, Perspectives, and Children’s Use of Classifiers
Date Issued
2006
Date
2006
Author(s)
Lin, Hsin-Yi
DOI
en-US
Abstract
The present study aims to examine the influence of contextual variances and prior linguistic knowledge on children’s classifier use. 30 4-year-olds (Age 4), 30 6-year-olds (Age 6), and 15 adults participated in the two tasks of this investigation. All these participants spoke Mandarin as their first language. The two tasks comprised story telling and question answering. The stories were made up to present contexts, and questions were designed to elicit participants’ classifier use. Two sets of materials contained in the tasks, in which one involved a shift from individuals to collections of individuals, and the other not. This individual-collection shift brought differences in the perceptual properties and in the functions of objects, which could influence participants’ classifier choices. The target nouns in these two tasks were divided into familiar ones in Task 1 and novel ones in Task 2. Each of these objects was assigned to two stories, intending to provide different contextual information, and trigger different classifier-noun sequences. From these tasks, participants’ classifier usage for both familiar and unfamiliar nouns under different contexts was obtained. The results showed that both contextual variances and unfamiliarity with objects could affect participants’ classifier use in all the three age groups. However, when the individual-collection shift was involved, the influence from contexts and unfamiliarity with objects was reduced.
Participants’ change of classifiers relate to their cognitive perspectives on objects. Clark (1997, 1998, 2003) claims that different contexts will activate speakers’ different perspectives, which are marked by word-choice. In this research, participants use different classifiers to present their chosen perspectives on objects in different contexts. Our findings further suggest that these perspectives are determined based on contextual information and multiple levels of nouns. Moreover, the contrast between individuals and collections which indicates a mass-count distinction should be also a crucial factor in classifier choices. According to these findings, this thesis supports Clark’s (1997, 1998, 2003) Multiple-perspective theory, and emphasizes the significance of contexts in word learning.
Subjects
情境
觀點
量詞
字彙學習
語言習得
context
perspective
classifier
word learning
language acquisition
Type
other
File(s)![Thumbnail Image]()
Loading...
Name
ntu-95-R92142008-1.pdf
Size
23.53 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum
(MD5):c15d9ea75fc7f191c1045e35257dd404