Bulletin Autumn‧Winter 1996

To d d l e rs Ha ve a La r ge a n d Va r i ed Vo c a b u l a ry A conservative analysis of the data shows that children, by the age of 2 1/2, use over 60 distinctive c ommon nouns and a w i de range of verb types. They have a grasp of the verbs of existence, location, and possession, v i z . 係 'be', 喺 'at', 有 ' h a v e ' . T h e y s h ow a c t i ve use of a r ound 10 intransitive verbs ( i n c l u d i ng 瞓'sleep', 行 'walk', 坐 'sit '，飛 'fly'), up to 50 transitive verbs (like 睇 'see', 搣 'pinch', 刮 ' p i e r c e ' ，搵 ' s e e k ’，知 ' k n o w ' ) ,s ix directional verbs (嚟' c ome '’ 上 'move-up', 出 ' mo v e - o u t ' , 去 ' g o ' , 返 ' r e t u r n ' , 落 ' mo v e- down'), and a couple of dative verbs, which take more than one object (e.g. 俾 'give'). In addition, children at this stage use around half a dozen adjectives, including adjectives denoting size ( e . g . 大 ' b i g ' ), quantity (e.g. 多 ' man y /mu c h ' ), colour ( e . g . 綠 ' g r een ' ), and evaluation (e.g.靚'pretty'). The research has also shown that the vocabulary of toddlers is not limited to nouns, verbs and adjectives ； these young children spontaneously produce various function words, including aspect markers, wh i ch signal temporal relationships, e.g. completion and progression (咗 'perfective' and 緊 'progressive'). The ir vocabulary consists of around 10 noun classifiers (e.g. 個，隻，張，架，粒， 啲 ，度，枝，間，本). Before they reach the age of 3, Cantonese children have started using adverbs such as 都 'also' and 仲 'still'. The child's knowledge of these adverbs is surprising, since these forms encode complex semantic information such as presupposition and elements of logical structure. Among the function words that y o u ng children use, sentence final particles figure p r omi nen t l y. These are forms attached to the final position of the utterance to signal mood, attitude, and qualification. By the age of 21/2, Cantonese children are p r odu c i ng at least 15 final particles (e.g.呀 ，啦， 口 架，噃）. The corpus shows that sentence final particles emerge right from the beginning of the two-word stage, w h e n c h i l d r en b e g in to f o r m sentences. Do the two-year-olds show any grasp of sentence structure? It is found that at this age, they produce canonical subject-verb- object sentences such as 'Bernard 踢佐個漢 堡飽( Bernard kicked a hamburger.)' or ‘ 我 鍾意呢個波波（I like this ball.)', in which the subject is the agent or experience!'. They also produce sentences in which the subject is a l o c a t i on, e.g. '我嘅袋袋有廁紙（ My pocket has toilet-paper.)', or ‘ 呢度係飛髮舖 呀 (This-place is a barbershop.)'. More than Just Babble 19