Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 April 2008
THE ACQUISITION OF THE CHINESEBA-CONSTRUCTION.Hang Du. Munich: Lincom Europa, 2006. Pp. 185. 64.20€.
Ubiquitous but elusive, the Chinese ba-construction has attracted a great deal of attention in Chinese linguistics, but its acquisition by second language (L2) learners has not been investigated systematically. This monograph, based on the author's doctoral dissertation, presents an interesting and innovative treatment of the acquisition of the Chinese ba-construction by native speakers of English. The volume fills a gap in the literature by investigating learners' sensitivity to the constraints on nominal phrases with ba (ba-NP) and verbal phrases with ba (ba-VP). An example of a ba-construction is given in (1), where the functional morpheme ba precedes the object, which, in turn, precedes the verb: