Relatives of Mandarin Children

Abstract

This paper reports a study on the elicited production of relative clauses by Mandarin-speaking children and adults, focusing on the distribution of resumptive pronouns and gaps in various types of relative constructions. Since Hamburger and Crain (1982) and Crain, McKee and Emiliani (1990), it has been demonstrated that in an elicited production task English-speaking and Italian-speaking children as young as 2;8 to 3;11 could produce appropriate relative clauses such as “Pick up the motorcycle that pushed the horse”. The interest in the use of resumptive pronouns in children’s production of relative clauses started from Labelle’s (1990, 1996) studies in French. Using pictures for elicitation, Labelle (1990) found that French-speaking 3to 6-year-old children used resumptive pronouns or NPs 49% of the time for Direct Object, Indirect Object, Locative, and Genitive relatives. In addition, although in French prepositional pied-piping is required for oblique relatives, the relatives produced by children in this study did not display pied-piping, but only used the complementizer que to connect the head noun and the relative clause. Furthermore, for subject relatives, the relative pronoun is qui in French, regardless of the gender of the subject. However, when the subject of the relative clause is feminine, French-speaking children produced ungrammatical forms with the complementizer que plus the feminine pronoun elle 25% of the time, instead of the correct form qui. Based on these non-adult forms of relative clauses children produced, Labelle (1990, 1996) argued that although children at this stage have acquired wh-movement in questions and other constructions, they do not form relatives through wh-movement, and so the percentage of resumptive elements is high. The author further proposed a hypothesis that at this stage (i.e. before 6 years old) children use relative clauses as the predicates