The Acquisition of Adjective Syntax by Chinese Monolingual Children: A Corpus Study

This thesis investigates the acquisition and development of adjective syntax among monolingual Chinese-speaking children through a comprehensive analysis of child language corpora.The theoretical section establishes the syntactic properties of Chinese adjectives, including their unique characteristics as predicates and modifiers. Building upon previous studies in the field of child language acquisition, this research addresses a significant gap in our understanding of how Chinese-speaking children develop competence in using adjectives across different syntactic positions and functions. Through the analysis of naturalistic language data from child corpora, this study reveals patterns in children's acquisition of adjective syntax, including their use of adjectives in attributive and predicative positions, the development of complex modificational structures. The findings contribute to our understanding of language acquisition processes and have implications for both theoretical linguistics and language education.