Abstract
This thesis aims to investigate children acquisition of novel causative and inchoative verb alternation in Mandarin Chinese. Two types of experiments were conducted: Elicited Production Task and Judgment Task. Through the experiments, we could understand the children how to express novel causative and inchoative verb alternation, how old the children could acquire causative verbs, what different expressions of novel causative and inchoative verb are in among three groups, the queries we asked whether affect children’s responses in lexical causative verbs or not and whether physical contact is a key point to affect the children’s response. The main finding were: (1) the 2;8- year-old children could use novel causative and inchoative verb alternation. (2) the children (from 2;8 to 4;7) were productive in novel causative and inchoative verbs alternation. (3) the 4;7-year-old children uttered periphrastic causative verbs more than the two younger groups. (4) physical contact was a crucial point for children in responses of lexical causative verbs. When the theme was directly manipulated the children used more lexical causative verbs. Besides, when the theme was indirectly manipulated the children produced a partly separate sentence of causatives and a partly truncated causative sentences. (5) the queries we asked effected the children’s response in lexical causative verbs.