Mandarin temporality inference in child, maternal and adult speech

Abstract

Previous studies on child language acquisition of temporality have focused primarily on linguistic devices such as tense and aspect markers; this study, however, adopts a different approach. By examining discourse-pragmatic resources, it investigates how implicit past reference was inferred in Mandarin child speech, maternal speech and adult speech. This approach is especially suitable for studying Mandarin Chinese, a tenseless language. The analysis shows that in three-year-old children's speech, situational context and background knowledge were the major resources for temporality inference. In maternal speech, temporal reference was inferred mainly from situational context. In adult speech, on the other hand, it was discourse context that played the major role. The results revealed three-year-old children's heavy reliance on the situational 'here-and-now' to express temporal relations and their limited abilities to assess the new/old information status of temporality. In addition, maternal speech adjustments in temporality inference were also evident in the data. Copyright © 2003 SAGE Publications.