The Polysemy of the Chinese Action Verb “Dǎ” and Its Implications in Child Language Acquisition

Abstract

The Chinese verb “dǎ” is a polysemous and frequently used verb. Studies have shown that it is one of the earliest verbs acquired by monolingual children by the age of five year old, they can use most of the commonly used senses in their daily life. But whether it is an easy task for bilingual children to acquire and use the verb in different contexts is unknown. Our study investigated the usage pattern of “dǎ” by 30 Chinese-English bilingual preschool children in Singapore. Visual stimuli depicting “dǎ” actions were used to elicit descriptions from the participants. The results reveal that the meaning representations of “dǎ” in the semantic domains such as “social interaction” and “physical punishment” are most commonly used by the children while the meaning representations of “dǎ” in the semantic domains such as “fastening” and “possession” are the least used by the children. This paper will discuss the factors that affect the children’s use of the polysemous verb.