以語料庫為本對“把”字在兒童語言習得動詞狀態之研究

Abstract

兒童語言習得研究者指出，兒童很早即開始使用「把」字句，但至少到五歲才可以完全習得「把」字句的結構。然而，對在語言習得早期階段「把」字句的研究，至今仍相當缺乏。Hsieh (2009) 從自己小孩所收集得來的語料做了歷時研究，提出在兒童語言「把」字句的發展過程中，可區分為五個階段。然而，以單一兒童的語料為研究基礎，就提出此假設，似乎過於草率。因此，本論文以兒童語料庫為本，旨在測試早期兒童語言習得階段「把」字是否被當作單純的詞彙動詞，而非在成年人語言中的語法詞類。 本論文主要收集、觀察、並分析四個兒童的語料。先前的研究指出，兒童的句法錯誤常可反映出他們對成年人語句知識的不足。因此，本研究試圖分析兒童語料中所發現的非成年人「把」字句。研究結果顯示，兒童的確在非常早期就開始使用「把」字句；而其使用非成年人「把」字句的頻率，(即錯誤率)，隨著兒童的成長而開始下降。此外，在兒童語料中，可歸納出三組現象作為有效的證據，支持本研究之假設：「把」字在一開始以詞彙動詞形式被習得。三組現象所列如下：(1) 「把」字句中VP的刪略， (2) 僅有典型「把」字句出現，以及(3) 直到特定的年齡bare verb 的型式才停止出現。 總結而言，本研究希望能藉著語料庫，對兒童語言中「把」字句的習得狀況做進一步的分析，並同時確認在兒童語言習得的早期階段，「把」字是被當作一個單純的詞彙動詞。

Researchers of the ba construction in the acquisition of children’s language have often suggested that children start using the ba construction very early and may not be fully proficient in the construction until 5 years old. However, little research conducted on the status of ba in the early stage in language acquisition. In Hsieh’s (2009) research, using the longitudinal data collected from her own child, she proposed that there are five stages marking the development of the ba construction. Nevertheless, it seems extremely premature to posit the assumption with the data from only one child. Therefore, the aim of this thesis attempts to use a corpus-based study to test the hypothesis that ba is firstly acquired as a lexical verb in the acquisition of child’s language not as a grammaticalized category as in adults’ language. In this research, four children’s spontaneous speech data are collected and analyzed. Since it is believed that children’s grammatical errors can represent their deficiency in the knowledge of adults’ language, we try to analyze those non-adult-like ba constructions found in the children’s spontaneous speech. Results of this study showed that the children in our study began using ba construction quite early and their non-adult-like ba construction, the error ratio, dropped as the children getting matured. Furthermore, three sets of condition found in the spontaneous production data can be the effective evidence to argue that our hypothesis that ba is firstly acquired as a lexical verb may be valid. The three evidences are presented as following respectively: (i) omission of VP in the ba construction; (ii) only canonical ba sentence appears; (iii) the bare verb form ceases to appear at a certain age. To conclude, this research may be of importance in exploring the acquisition of ba construction in children’s language through a corpus-based study, as well as in establishing the hypothesis that ba is a lexical verb in the early stage in children’s language.