A corpus-based comparison of the aspect markers in early child Cantonese between 1995 and 2010

Abstract

Aspect marker was one of the important linguistic systems to reflect the temporal concepts in Cantonese. Despite the function of reflecting the concepts of time, aspect markers were believed to be closely related to cognitive ability of population and social changes of the society and claimed as an useful device for investigating the social and cognitive changes in Hong Kong. A Corpus-based Comparison of aspect markers in early child Cantonese between 1995 and 2010 was then carried out in order to figure out a clearer picture of the differences of cognition development of children and social cultures of Hong Kong. Two largest and comparable early child Cantonese corpora, the 1995 Early Child Cantonese Corpus (ECCC) (Tse & Li, 2011) and the 2010 Early Child Cantonese Corpus (ECMC) (Li & Tse, 2011), were collected through naturalistic approach. The ECCC included totally 492 native Cantonese-speaking children while the ECMC included 143 native Cantonese-speaking children. The representative language samples of children from both corpora were extracted and the acquisition patterns of Cantonese aspect markers were analyzed through descriptive statistics in current study. Finding of current study showed that the corpus-based comparison of Cantonese aspect markers was effective in reflecting the cognitive progress across the era of 1995 and 2010. However, the results revealed that aspect markers were not as sensitive as expected to be the indicator for the social changes.