The Emergence of Serial Verb Constructions in Child Cantonese

This dissertation, "The Emergence of Serial Verb Constructions in Child Cantonese" by So-hing, Sandra, Fung, 馮素卿, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: This study examines the emergence and development of the Cantonese serial verb construction (SVC) in children from 1;03 to 4;06 by investigating the naturalistic data from two longitudinal corpora. This study presents a descriptive account of the emergence and development of SVCs in early child Cantonese, seeks to explain the developmental facts from a constructionist usage-based perspective, and compares the development of SVCs in Cantonese-English bilinguals with that in Cantonese monolinguals. It is found that children start to produce SVCs spontaneously at an early age of 1;10 and that the overall frequency of occurrence is low during the developmental period studied. The early emergence of SVCs is attributed to children's preference for iconic structures. Four surface forms are identified and shown to emerge with a consistent order: two-verb contiguous (1;10-11) contiguous (2;02) complexities are suggested to be the possible factors that influence the order. The earlier emergence of contiguous forms than non-contiguous forms is explained by the hypothesis that cross-linguistically unmarked structures tend to be acquired earlier than the marked ones (O'Grady 2000). Such a generalization is compatible with constructionist approaches in suggesting cross-linguistic cognitive functional preferences for language processing. Children tend to use certain component verbs that express eight main semantic notions. The study interprets children's SVCs as concrete instantiations of eight sub-constructions, which are subsumed by a more abstract high level SVC schema. It is observed that sub-constructions develop asynchronously, as the developmental paths of the four more frequently used SVCs (directional, dative, purpose and resultative SVCs) are more advanced than the four less often produced SVCs (instrumental, benefactive, comitative and locative SVCs). Developmental paths of the former are shown to be consistent with Tomasello's (2003) usage-based account of language development: from concrete expressions, to pivot schemas, then to item-based constructions. However, this study does not have enough data to suggest the emergence of an abstract schema for the high level SVC. It is found that children imitate adults' previous SVCs and repeat their own spontaneous productions frequently. These highlight the roles of the ambient language and linguistic use to children's language development. The overall error rates of SVCs are found to be low. The reasons proposed for error production, that are, adult input, generalization from item-based constructions and complexity of target constructions, are considered as evidence to support the constructionist usage-based approach. This study shows that Cantonese-dominant bilinguals resemble Cantonese monolinguals in developing SVCs. Language dominance is invoked to account for the developmental similarities observed. Only a few code-mixed instances are recorded, suggesting limited English influence on Cantonese SVCs. It is argued that SVCs are not a vulnerable doma