Acquisition of Anaphora in Child Mandarin

<p><i>The Acquisition of Anaphora in Child Mandarin</i> explores how Mandarin-speaking children’s interpretation of the reflexive<i> ziji </i>and their use of null arguments can be understood under the notions of locality and prominence.</p><p>This book investigates the interpretation of <i>ziji</i> and the use of null subjects and null objects by experimenting on Mandarin-speaking children and adults using a range of experimental techniques such as the truth value judgment task the picture identification task and the story-telling task.</p><p>The book provides evidence to show that reflexive binding and argument dropping are determined by the interplay between universal principles and language-specific properties. It shows that children at the age of 4 make an adult-like distinction between the anaphoric and logophoric interpretations of <i>ziji</i>. The former is subject to the locality condition manifested by the blocking effect on the long-distance binding of <i>ziji</i> whereas the latter is free from the locality condition and closely related to the understanding of the false beliefs of others.</p><p>This book is an important contribution to language acquisition research and can serve as a valuable reference for graduate students and researchers in the field of language acquisition Chinese linguistics psycholinguistics and cognitive science.</p>