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This paper presents new experimental results obtained from 88 Mandarin speaking children (2; 11 – 4; 09; M = 3; 11; SD = 0; 6; 44 girls) in their acquisition of 'shenme '‘a/some’, a prototypical superweak Negative Polarity Item (NPI) that survives in nonveridical contexts only (cf. Lin Jing et al. 2014). The existence of NPIs like 'shenme 'leads to a learnability problem. Without being confronted with negative evidence, such as corrective feedback or explicit instructions on 'shenme'’s ungrammaticality in contexts that are not nonveridical, how can children detect 'shenme'’s distributional constraint? By analysing children’s performance in an elicited imitation task, this paper investigates the learnability of the superweak NPI in Mandarin Chinese. The results suggest a learning process in which Mandarin children initially analyse 'shenme 'as a mere 'wh-'quantifier and reanalyse it as a referentially deficient quantifier later on. The 'wh-'analysis gives rise to a distribution of 'shenme 'in 'wh'-questions only, whereas the non-referential analysis generates 'shenme'’s distribution in the whole array of nonveridical contexts. The investigation of the acquisition of the Mandarin NPI 'shenme 'shows that children are able to acquire distributionally constrained items in the absence of negative evidence: they start out with a strict assumption (i.e. the 'wh-'analysis) and switch to a less strict and generalising analysis (i.e. the non-referential analysis) later on

Distributionally constrained items in child language: the acquisition of superweak NPI shenme ‘a/some’ in Mandarin Chinese