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Chapter 11. The meaning of question words in statements in child Mandarin

  • Stephen Crain and Peng Zhou
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Semantics in Language Acquisition
This chapter is in the book Semantics in Language Acquisition

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of three experiments investigating children’s emerging knowledge of the semantics of information-seeking questions and declarative statements in Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is particularly revealing about the semantic relationship between questions and statements, because it is a wh-in-situ language where question words appear in the same surface syntactic position in both questions and statements. The non-interrogative meanings that Mandarin-speaking children assign to question words lend weight to a unified approach to the semantics of existential expressions, including Free Choice Expressions, Negative Polarity Items, and disjunction words. When Mandarin question words appear in statements, children interpret them to be the semantic equivalents of existential expressions. The findings, therefore, support the unified approach to the semantics of existential expressions.

Abstract

This paper reports the findings of three experiments investigating children’s emerging knowledge of the semantics of information-seeking questions and declarative statements in Mandarin Chinese. Mandarin is particularly revealing about the semantic relationship between questions and statements, because it is a wh-in-situ language where question words appear in the same surface syntactic position in both questions and statements. The non-interrogative meanings that Mandarin-speaking children assign to question words lend weight to a unified approach to the semantics of existential expressions, including Free Choice Expressions, Negative Polarity Items, and disjunction words. When Mandarin question words appear in statements, children interpret them to be the semantic equivalents of existential expressions. The findings, therefore, support the unified approach to the semantics of existential expressions.

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Chapter 1. The historical emergence and current study of semantics in acquisition 1
  4. Section I. Lexical meaning
  5. Chapter 2. Word meanings and semantic domains in acquisition 21
  6. Chapter 3. The influence of linguistic temporal organization on children’s understanding of temporal terms and concepts 45
  7. Chapter 4. Semantic features of early verb vocabularies 67
  8. Section II. Event semantics
  9. Chapter 5. On the acquisition of event culmination 95
  10. Chapter 6. Telicity in typical and impaired acquisition 123
  11. Section III. Syntactic structure and semantic meaning
  12. Chapter 7. Not all subjects are agents 153
  13. Chapter 8. Analogical structure mapping and the formation of abstract constructions 177
  14. Chapter 9. The labeling problem in syntactic bootstrapping 197
  15. Chapter 10. Perspectives on truth 221
  16. Section IV. Logical interpretations
  17. Chapter 11. The meaning of question words in statements in child Mandarin 249
  18. Chapter 12. Overt, covert, and clandestine operations 275
  19. Section V. The relation between semantics and pragmatics
  20. Chapter 13. Developmental insights into gappy phenomena 301
  21. Chapter 14. Four-year-old children compute scalar implicatures in absence of epistemic reasoning 325
  22. Chapter 15. The acquisition path of near-reflexivity 351
  23. List of Topics 379
  24. List of Languages 387
  25. List of Authors 389
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.11ste

Chapters in this book

  1. Prelim pages i
  2. Table of contents v
  3. Chapter 1. The historical emergence and current study of semantics in acquisition 1
  4. Section I. Lexical meaning
  5. Chapter 2. Word meanings and semantic domains in acquisition 21
  6. Chapter 3. The influence of linguistic temporal organization on children’s understanding of temporal terms and concepts 45
  7. Chapter 4. Semantic features of early verb vocabularies 67
  8. Section II. Event semantics
  9. Chapter 5. On the acquisition of event culmination 95
  10. Chapter 6. Telicity in typical and impaired acquisition 123
  11. Section III. Syntactic structure and semantic meaning
  12. Chapter 7. Not all subjects are agents 153
  13. Chapter 8. Analogical structure mapping and the formation of abstract constructions 177
  14. Chapter 9. The labeling problem in syntactic bootstrapping 197
  15. Chapter 10. Perspectives on truth 221
  16. Section IV. Logical interpretations
  17. Chapter 11. The meaning of question words in statements in child Mandarin 249
  18. Chapter 12. Overt, covert, and clandestine operations 275
  19. Section V. The relation between semantics and pragmatics
  20. Chapter 13. Developmental insights into gappy phenomena 301
  21. Chapter 14. Four-year-old children compute scalar implicatures in absence of epistemic reasoning 325
  22. Chapter 15. The acquisition path of near-reflexivity 351
  23. List of Topics 379
  24. List of Languages 387
  25. List of Authors 389
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