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Acquiring causatives in Taiwan Southern Min*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 April 2008

HUEI-LING LIN  and
JANE S. TSAY
HUEI-LING LIN*
Affiliation:
National Chung Cheng University
JANE S. TSAY*
Affiliation:
National Chung Cheng University
*
Address for correspondence: Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, National Chung Cheng University, Min-Hsiung, Chiayi 62107Taiwan, R.O.C.
Address for correspondence: Department of Foreign Languages & Literature, National Chung Cheng University, Min-Hsiung, Chiayi 62107Taiwan, R.O.C.
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Abstract

This case study is based on the longitudinal data of a girl (LYC, 1 ; 2–3 ; 3) acquiring Taiwan Southern Min (TSM) as her first language, and it aims to discover the overgeneralization pattern of children acquiring causatives in TSM. Among the three types of causative, the errors found in other languages are mostly with lexical causatives; however, in TSM, the errors occur with morphological and analytic causatives. Being an analytic language, TSM tends to spell out the causative meaning through morphological and analytic causatives and thus most errors occur with these two types. In contrast, lexical causatives, which contain a semantic element CAUSE, were acquired late; in the data collected (1 ; 2–3 ; 3) lexical causatives were not yet found. This case study provides evidence from TSM to show a different overgeneralization pattern.

Type
Brief Research Report
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , May 2008 , pp. 467 - 487
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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Footnotes

*

Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the National Science Council (NSC 93-2420-H-194-003-KD). We would like to thank Professor James H.-Y. Tai for his valuable comments on the draft of this paper.

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