ABSTRACT
This chapter examines in detail the diachronic development of ditransitive constructions in three Chinese children before the age of 04;06 and discovers that the acquisition process of children's ditransitive constructions is exceptionally consistent. It explores the early acquisition characteristics of the ditransitive construction and their rational interpretation through the spontaneous speech corpora of three young Chinese children. After the three children acquired the single-argument GEI construction, they successively produced dual-argument GEI constructions. However, none of the dual-argument GEI constructions initially produced by the children were ditransitive constructions – the two arguments were assigned to the subject and object positions. When the children had acquired one or two types of dual-argument monotransitive GEI construction, they began to produce a large number of ditransitive constructions. Within one to three months after the production of the ditransitive construction without the subject, the child successively produced ditransitive constructions with the subject.
