THE ACQUISITION OF VIETNAMESE CLASSIFIERS - UHM

615 Pages·2011·6.07 MB·English

THE ACQUISITION OF VIETNAMESE CLASSIFIERS

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE
UNIVERSITY OF HAWAI‘I AT MĀNOA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE
REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

IN

LINGUISTICS

AUGUST 2011

By
Jennie Tran

Dissertation Committee:

Ann M. Peters, Chairperson
Kamil Ud Deen
William O‘Grady
David Stampe
Niklaus Schweizer
© 2011, Jennie Tran

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To my Mother (Mạ)

who departed
just three days
after I arrived in Vietnam
to begin the data collection
for this dissertation.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It has been a long process to complete this dissertation and I have learned so much while
working on it, but this learning process would have not been possible without the support
of a number of individuals to whom I would like to express my gratitude.

First, I would like to sincerely thank my committee members. I am deeply grateful to my
advisor, the chairperson of the committee, Ann Peters, on multiple levels, for all her
efforts over the years in training me to become an independent researcher and scholar in
the field of child language acquisition. I have learned so much from her knowledge,
expertise, and experience in collecting and working with longitudinal child data. Many
thanks for reading and giving very helpful comments on my earlier drafts. Not only was
she my academic advisor and mentor but she was also, on a personal level, like a second
Mom. I thank her profoundly for her tremendous emotional support during the most
difficult time of my life, the unexpected one-year stay in Texas to take care of my mother
that interrupted my PhD studies. I sincerely thank her for all the hours she talked to me
on the phone to give me strength to cope with the illness of my mother. Next, I thank
Kamil Ud Deen for introducing me to the intriguing field of child language acquisition,
for sharing with me his knowledge on child language and experience with longitudinal
data collection, for his modesty and guidance, and for repeatedly encouraging me to
develop professionally. I thank William O‘Grady for sparking my interest in descriptive
syntax, for taking the time to go over with me the syntax of classifier languages, for his
brilliant mind, and for teaching me to be critical, creative, and empirical as a doctoral
student. I thank David Stampe for sharing his expertise in Austroasiatic and Southeast
Asian languages, who has inspired me to learn more about the language family of my
native language, and for his kindness and charismatic insight in both linguistic and life
issues. I thank Niklaus Schweizer for his generosity, positive-mindedness, and his
continual support and encouragement in my academic endeavors.

A number of people from the Linguistics department in Hawai‗i have been helpful during
my PhD studies, and I would also like to give them my thanks: Kurt Brunner for help
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with the recording equipment; Patricia Donegan for help with the phonetic transcription
of Vietnamese classifiers; Laurie Durand and Amanda Hamilton for editing; Jennifer
Kanda and Nora Lum for help with formatting and knowledge of all the deadlines and
paperwork; Dorinda Liu and Kanjana Thepboriruk for information and judgments about
their native languages; Kaori Ueki for help with formatting and for introducing me to the
very first Vietnamese parent in Honolulu whose child I recorded for the first time. And
thanks to Christine Hansen, Tomoko Miyakoshi, Mai Han Nguyen, and Laura Sacia and
for their tips and encouragement.

I would also like to give thanks to some people outside of the Linguistics department who
have helped me in various ways: Brian MacWhinney and Leonard Spektor for help with
CLAN; Hanh Nguyen for her Vietnamese native-speaker judgment, her sharing of some
crucial sources about Vietnamese classifiers, and her comments on the earlier version of
the first chapter; Hong Con Nguyen, Giang Nguyen, and Marc Brunelle for interesting
conversations about Vietnamese classifiers; Barbara Schulz for tips on NSF grant
proposal writing; Hong Tu for translating a Mandarin source. Thanks to Daniel Hole and
Elisabeth Löbel for inviting me to present my results on syntactic development of
classifiers at the Workshop in Stuttgart, Germany. Thanks to the audience who asked
interesting questions and gave helpful comments at the conferences at which I presented
portions of this dissertation (SEALS 18, UCLA – UC Berkeley Joint Conference on
Southeast Asian Studies, SEALS 19, and Workshop on Linguistics of Vietnamese).

The data collection for this doctoral dissertation research was made possible by the
financial support of the National Science Foundation. I was very honored to receive the
NSF Doctoral Research Grant BCS-0545268 to conduct this acquisition research on the
Vietnamese language.

Many special thanks are extended to all the Vietnamese people who helped me during my
first six-week trip for piloting and my second one-year data collection trip to Vietnam. I
want to thank them in chronological order: Hanh Nguyen‘s mother for introducing me to
the daycare center in Hue; Trần Sáng for providing me with some crucial sources on
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Vietnamese classifiers and introducing me to some Vietnamese Linguistics professors;
Thùy Linh for driving me around in Saigon to find daycare centers and her family for
offering me a room during my first trip to Vietnam; chị Minh for getting the permission
for me to perform my pilot study in Saigon; Hương for driving me to the daycare center
everyday on the scooter during my pilot study; Bùi Mạnh Hùng for introducing me to the
most competent graduate students who assisted me in transcribing the data; thầy Dũng
and chị Dung for permitting and introducing me to the daycare center in Saigon at which
I performed various elicited production tasks, a portion of which is analyzed in this
dissertation; chị Mai, chị Sáu, Thanh Bình, Thùy Linh (Lỳ), and Sa Huỳnh for helping
me find potential children for my longitudinal study; the principals and all the teachers
who so kindly interacted with me and tried their best to provide me with as good a
recording environment as they could at the daycare centers. My sweetest thanks to the
four young children, Minh, Hà Mi, Liêm, Giang, who participated in the longitudinal data
collection, and their parents and caretakers, and all the young children at the three
daycare centers in Hue and Saigon, who participated in the pilot study and the cross-
sectional data collection of this project.
My very special thanks go to Hải Như, Sa Huỳnh, and Thùy Linh (Lỳ) for doing a very
good job transcribing the data; Nguyễn Thị Vân for assisting me with genuine dedication
and enthusiasm in the cross-sectional data collection; Thùy Linh (Lỳ) for assisting me in
collecting the data of the two male children; Hải Như and Sa Huỳnh for some important
sources on Vietnamese classifiers; Cữu Long for help with organizing some of the data;
chị Thanh, anh Lộc, thầy Hùng, and thầy Dũng for sharing important information about
the noun system of the Vietnamese language.

Last, I would like to thank my family. Special thanks go to my oldest sister Vy, who
provided me some financial support during the time of writing this dissertation. Many
loving and dearest thanks to my older sister Kim, who has been like my best friend,
talking to and advising me in all aspects of life including finishing this dissertation. Her
support and prayers have helped me tremendously. Deepest thanks also to her husband
Todd for his generosity, enormous support, and encouragement, both financial and
emotional. Thanks to my brother Thành for his continual encouragement, my sister Jade
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and Huệ, brothers Khuê, Cường, and Trung for various things, and my father for his
patience. I would like to express my deepest thanks to my husband, Akbar. Without his
help, patience and sacrifice I would not have been able to finish the dissertation in due
time. And finally, my most special thanks, in loving memory, to my Mother: Dear Mom,
I thank you for your blessings, for guiding me and helping me with getting through and
finishing this dissertation amid all the grieving and the busy life with two newborns
during the process of writing.
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ABSTRACT

This dissertation is the first study on the acquisition of the numeral classifier system in
Vietnamese, covering the development of both the syntactic and semantic aspects of
classifiers and employing both longitudinal and cross-sectional data. Naturalistic
longitudinal data were collected over a period of 6–9 months from four children from
monolingual families living in Vietnam, who were ages 1;9, 1;11, 2;4, and 2;5 at the
study‘s start, to determine which classifiers emerged first and to trace the early
development of classifier phrases. To investigate later syntactic and semantic
development, cross-sectional data were collected from 38 children between the ages 2;10
and 5;7, at a daycare center in Saigon, Vietnam.
The first goal was to increase our knowledge of strategies that children use in the
acquisition of their native language. The second aim was to compare the Vietnamese
results to data from other Asian languages for which classifier acquisition data exists,
primarily Cantonese, Mandarin, and Thai. Two cross-linguistic strategies that this study
confirms are: the use of the general classifier as a syntactic placeholder and default
classifier, and the overgeneralization of acquired classifiers to nouns that require
classifiers that children have not yet acquired. Three cross-linguistic findings consistent
with this study include: children perform better with non-numeral than numeral classifier
phrases; children only slowly acquire specific shape, function, and arrangement-based
classifiers, while mastering the general and the animal classifiers early; and children have
early knowledge of a set of core classifiers. Errors made by children cross-linguistically
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that this study confirms are classifier omission in a numeral noun phrase and the use of
double classifiers.
However, the findings for Vietnamese differ from those for other languages in
that Vietnamese-speaking children show a lower rate of general classifier use and a
higher rate of correct specific classifier use. Unexpected findings include the children‘s
unexpected tendency to omit the classifier with disyllabic nouns, and the very prevalent
occurrence of a noun together with a classifier in the youngest children‘s speech,
suggesting that early classifiers and their nouns are often acquired as amalgams.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………iii
Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………iv
Abstract………………………………………………………………………………..viii
Table of contents………………………………………………………………………...x
List of tables…………………………………………………………………………..xvii
List of figures………………………………………………………………………...xxiii

Chapter 1 The Vietnamese classifier system
Introduction………………………………………………………………………….... 1
1.1 Some basics about Vietnamese………………………………………………….. 4
1.2 Word order of the Vietnamese NP……………………………………………..... 6
1.3 Syntactic properties of Vietnamese classifier phrases…………………………... 8
1.3.1 Obligatory occurrence of classifier in the presence of numeral………...... 8
1.3.2 Anaphoric use of the classifier……………………………………….... .. 10
1.3.3 Adjacency of the numeral and the classifier………………………… ...... 12
1.4 Syntactic criteria for Vietnamese nouns and classifiers..................................... 13
1.5 Why the need for classifiers? ........................................................................ 15
1.5.1 Ambiguity between singular and plural………………………………...... 15
1.5.2 Individuating nouns…………………………………………………….... 16
1.6 The Vietnamese noun system………………………………………………….... 17
1.6.1 Classifiers as a subclass of nouns………………………………………... 19
1.6.2 Classifiers versus measure nouns....................................................... 21
1.6.2.1 Classifiers........................................................................... 21
1.6.2.2 Measure nouns………………………………………………… 22
1.6.2.3 Differences between classifiers and measure nouns………… 23
1.6.3 Classified vs. non-classified nouns…………………………………….., 28
1.6.4 Nouns that are both noun and classifier………………………………… 31
1.6.5 Verbal classifiers……………………………………………………….. 34
1.7 Definiteness and specificity…………………………………………………….. 35
1.7.1 Non-numeral classifier phrases (CL-N)………………………………… 35
1.7.2 Indefiniteness………………………………………………………….... 38
1.7.3 Deictic expressions……………………………………………………... 38
1.7.4 The extra ―cái‖ and definiteness……………………………………….... 41
1.8 Plural markers ………………………………………………………………... 45
1.9 Confusion between classifier phrases and compounds………………………... 45
1.10. Semantics of Vietnamese classifiers…………………………………………... 47
1.10.1 Meaning……………………………………………………… .. 47
1.10.2 Nouns with multiple classifiers……………………………………… 50
1.10.3 Number of classifiers…………………………………………………. 52
1.10.4 Categorization…………………………………………………………. 53
1.10.4.1 Vietnamese categorization………………………………… 53
1.10.4.2 Categorizing classifiers for studying their acquisition……. 57
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