ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the theoretical issues of syntactic development in young children through the ZAI construction. Syntactic development during early childhood is the most attractive topic of language acquisition, and it is also where the theories regarding language acquisition differ. There are many in-depth non-Chinese studies on this issue, but research of early syntactic development using Chinese children’s language acquisition data is still very scarce. The “zai” construction has a non-uniform structure and consistent semantics and is a prototype sentence category. It can be used to examine children’s acquisition of syntactic structures with gradually combined features when their semantics are equivalent. As such, children’s understanding and production of the “zai” construction is indeed a window for investigating children’s early syntactic development. The chapter provides the data that include two parts: one is children’s spontaneous output; the other is data obtained through experiments.
