L1 Acquisition of Si-related Metaphorical Expressions
The purpose of the present study is to examine the Chinese word si and first language acquisition of its metaphorical expressions. Three issues were discussed, i.e., Markedness Theory (Goodluck, 1991), contextual effects, and animacy effects. A total of 144 subjects from an elementary school were asked to participate in the study. They were further divided into six age groups (6;4,7;7,8;7,9;7,10;7,11 ;6). Two comprehension tasks were employed: the Words in Isolation (WII) Task, and the Words in Context (WIC) Task. The results showed that literal expressions of si phrases, which were unmarked (Goodluck, 1991), were easier for the children to comprehend than metaphorical and marked expressions. The children performed better on the WIC Task than that on the WII Task, and contextual clues were beneficial for the children especially in identifying the metaphorical phrases. Last, it was found that the interpretation of si phrases was constrained by the animate feature of the subject NP.
L1 acquisition Markedness context animacy metaphors
Meng-husan Claire Hsieh Chun-yin Doris Chen
国际会议
2009 International Conference on Applied Linguistics & Language Teaching(2009应用语言学暨语言教学国际研讨会)
台湾
英文
597-607
2009-04-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）