The Acquisition of Causative Alternation in Mandarin Chinese: Evidence for Children’s Early Knowledge of Semantic Constraints

In Mandarin Chinese, the causative alternation can be explained in terms of semantic factors, in particular the direct causation constraint and modes of causation. Despite these semantic regularities, it remains unclear whether Mandarin-speaking children draw on such constraints in acquiring the causative alternation, particularly given the prevalence of apparently inconsistent mappings at the syntax-semantics interface in Mandarin. This study involves three experiments using a video-verification task to examine whether 4- and 5-year-old Mandarin-acquiring children rely on semantic constraints to identify the causativizable intransitives. Experiment 1 examined whether Mandarin-acquiring children are sensitive to the direct causation constraint in interpreting lexical causative sentences derived from alternating verbs. Experiment 2 investigated whether the children appeal to the direct causation constraint in interpreting artificially constructed lexical causatives with non-alternating intransitive verbs. Experiment 3 tested whether Mandarin-speaking children make use of modes of causation in understanding artificially created lexical causatives containing non-alternating intransitive verbs with either an unspecified mode of causation, or a specified internal cause for the causative events. Results show that Mandarin-acquiring children aged between 4-5 and 5-6 only permitted the direct causative reading for lexical causative sentences, regardless of whether such sentences are attested in adult language. Moreover, they showed significantly higher acceptance of causative interpretations for verbs with an unspecified mode of causation than for internally caused verbs. The three experiments jointly corroborate the fundamental role of the form-meaning mapping regularities and verb semantic properties in Mandarin-speaking children's acquisition of the causative alternation.