Word Learning by Young Bilinguals: Understanding the Denotation and Connotation Differences of “Cut” Verbs in English and Chinese

31st Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation (PACLIC 31), pages 241–248 Cebu City, Philippines, November 16-18, 2017 Copyright c⃝2017 Keng Hwee Neo and Helena Gao Word Learning by Young Bilinguals: Understanding the Denotation and Connotation Differences of “Cut” Verbs in English and Chinese Keng Hwee Neo Helena Hong Gao School of Humanities School of Humanities Nanyang Technological University Nanyang Technological University NEO016@e.ntu.edu.sg helenagao@ntu.edu.sg Abstract This paper discusses the semantic differences of four “cut” verbs in Chinese jiǎn, qiē, xīu, gē and their English counterparts cut (with scissors), slice/cut, trim/prune (away/off) and cut (off/out) and challenges that young bilingual children may encounter in word learning. The fine differences of the verbs were first identified with references to usage notes in dictionaries and thesaurus and then represented with an approach for lexical differentiation adopted from DiMarco et al., (1992).The nuances and subtleties of the denotation and connotation of the “cut” verbs were illustrated accordingly for the understanding of bilingual word learning by young children. 1 Introduction “Cut” verbs belong to a sub-class of physical action verbs (PA verbs) named “hand action verbs with instrument” (Gao, 2001, 2015). The basic conceptual knowledge that forms the semantics of the verbs include the information of body part, the hand(s) in this case, the cut action in a specific manner, a particular instrument used, degree of force applied, motion direction of the hand(s), and/or a causative result. Cut in English and qiē in Chinese are the basic verbs of “cut” verb class. English speaking children were found to be able to use the verb cut in a causative syntactic frame around 3 years old (Sethuraman and Goodman, 2004). Chinese speaking children started to produce the first “cut” verbs qiē ‘cut’ at 17 months old. This shows that children before 3 years old have had observations or even physically conducted cutting actions (e.g., cutting a cake or an apple, etc.). Other studies have shown that action words naming movable and manipulative objects that can be used when playing with hands or feet are among the first acquired vocabulary of young children (Tomasello 1992; Gao 2015; Ma et al. 2009; Tardif et al. 2009). Such action words are either PA verbs or verbs that indirectly denote certain physical actions. For example, in Gao’s (2001; 2015) studies, a total of 143 PA verbs in Mandarin were found to have been used by children between 1.9 and 2.3 years old. These verbs can be classified into 12 categories and close to half of them depict hand actions with or without an instrument. Mu’s (2009) study also found that PA verbs were the first and core vocabulary of Mandarin-speaking children between 1 to 2 years of age. Zhang’s (2010) corpus-based analysis of the Chinese language use by children between 3 to 6 years of age discovered that the frequencies of their noun and verb usage were comparable and highly dominant in their production. Out of the 100 mostly frequently produced words by the children, 31 were identified as verbs. …

Content truncated to 500 words