在語調語言中(Intonation language)，重音通常為提示焦點的手段。在含有焦點副詞 「只」(only) 的歧義句中，透過重音與句子中成分(constituent)的連繫，還可區別語意，改變句子真假值，此情況稱為焦點關聯現象(association with focus)。中文為聲調語言(Tone language)，但對於焦點關聯現象卻甚少研究。本研究目的為瞭解以中文為母語的國中生，是否使用重音來理解包含焦點副詞「只」的歧義句。本研究受測句型包括三種雙賓句（dative construction, double object construction 和「把」字句），受試者在聽完故事後，會聽到一句包含焦點副詞「只」的句子，受試者需依據故事內容判斷該句真假值，並在問卷中選出答案。受試者為台中地區國中八年級學生。本研究包含三個實驗，實驗一的受試者為116位普通班學生，實驗結果顯示重音並非理解「只」歧義句的方法。實驗二受試者為30位資優班學生，並將故事人物改為受測對象較不熟悉的卡通人物，研究結果發現重音仍非理解「只」歧義句的方法。實驗三與實驗二的施測內容、對象相同，但實驗三的語言為英文。研究結果顯示，以中文為母語的國中生，雖然對中文的對比重音有敏感度，但並不傾向當作區別「只」語意的方法。且在焦點連繫方面，直接受詞並非受試者偏好連繫的焦點，間接受詞反而是受試者較偏好的選項，這種情況在「把」字句中特別明顯。英文「只」句也有相同的結果，很有可能是受到母語中文的影響。

In the research of focus on intonation languages, it is generally assumed that the stress not only signals the focus but also contributes to the different truth condition in sentences containing focus particle only. This phenomenon is known as ‘association with focus’ (Jackendoff, 1972; Rooth, 1985, 1992, among others). However, this phenomenon has not been comprehensively studied in tonal languages such as Chinese. To further investigate whether the stress signals the focus in triadic sentences with zhi ‘only’ and whether there is a preferred default focus interpretation, the study probes into the issue with respect to younger participants, i.e., teenagers in junior high schools. The study contains triadic sentences such as dative construction, double object construction and ba construction. Participants were asked to choose the focus which zhi ‘only’ is associated with in a multiple choice questionnaire after the stories and test sentences were shown by a powerpoint file in the computer. There were three experiments in this study. In Experiment 1, 116 participants in the regular classes judged a contrastive stress awareness task and a modified Truth Value Judgment (TVJ) Task. Experiment 2 (TVJ task only) followed Experiment 1 except for using unfamiliar Cartoon figures. Experiment 3 (the contrastive stress awareness task and the TVJ task) reduplicated Experiment 2 in English. The participants in Experiment 2 and 3 were the same 30 participants in the gifted class. The results, first, further confirmed that even though Chinese teenagers were aware of the contrastive stress, they did not use it for disambiguating sentences with zhi ‘only’ in both Chinese and English. Second, the participants tended not to choose the default wide VP focus but narrow focus. However, contrary to the default narrow DO focus that Chinese adult speakers preferred, the teenager participants favored the narrow focus which usually falls on the neutral stress (sentence-final) position. The phenomenon is even more salient in ba construction. Third, in English, contrastive stress was not used for disambiguation although they were aware of the stress. The interpretation of English focus particle only was similar to that of Chinese, so it was ascribed to L1 transfer.

ABSTRACT II
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS III
TABLE OF CONTENTS V
LIST OF TABLES VII
LIST OF FIGURES VIII
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS IX
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.1 BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY 1
1.2 PURPOSE OF THE STUDY 2
1.3 ORGANIZATION OF THE THESIS 3
CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 4
2.1 CHARACTERISTICS OF SENTENCES WITH ONLY 4
2.1.1 Stress and Association with Focus 4
2.1.2 Stress and Sentences with Zhi ‘Only’ in Mandarin Chinese 6
2.2 INTERFACE VIEW OF FOCUS 8
2.3 PREVIOUS ACQUISITION STUDIES ON SENTENCES WITH ONLY 10
2.3.1 First Language Acquisition 10
2.3.2 Second Language Acquisition 15
2.4 DEFAULT FOCUS INTERPRETATION 19
2.4.1 Default Wide Focus 19
2.4.2 Default Narrow Focus 20
2.5 TRIADIC SENTENCES AND FOCUS ASSOCIATION 22
2.5.1 DATIVE and DOC—Postverbal Position for Focus 22
2.5.2 Ba Construction—Preverbal Position for Focus 24
CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY 26
3.1 HYPOTHESIS 26
3.2 MATERIALS AND DESIGN 28
3.2.1 Stories 29
3.2.2 Tested Sentences 31
3.3 EXP. 1: COMPREHENSION OF CHINESE ZHI ‘ONLY’ 34
3.3.1 Contrastive Stress Awareness Task 34
3.3.2 Truth Value Judgment task 36
3.4 EXP. 2: COMPREHENSION OF CHINESE ZHI ‘ONLY’— UNFAMILIAR CARTOON CHARACTERS 38
3.4.1 Truth Value Judgment task 39
3.5 EXP. 3: COMPREHENSION OF ENGLISH ONLY—UNFAMILIAR CARTOON CHARACTERS 40
3.5.1 Contrastive Stress Awareness Task 40
3.5.2. Truth Value Judgment task 42
CHAPTER 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSION 44
4.1 RESULTS 44
4.1.1 Exp. 1: Comprehension of Chinese Zhi ‘Only’ 44
4.1.2 Exp. 2: Comprehension of Chinese Zhi ‘Only’--Unfamiliar Cartoon Characters 47
4.1.3 Exp. 3: Comprehension of English Only--Unfamiliar Cartoon Characters 48
4.2 DISCUSSION 50
4.2.1 Contrastive Stress and Focus 50
4.2.2 Focus Interpretation 53
4.2.3 Neutral Stress 55
4.2.4 Preverbal Position for Focus— Ba Construction 59
4.2.5 EFL learners’ Acquisition of Only 60
CHAPTER 5 CONCUSION 63
5.1 SUMMARY 63
5.2 LIMITATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS 64
REFERENCES 66
APPENDIX A—BACKGROUND QUESTIONNAIRE 73
APPENDIX B—TVJ TASK 74
APPENDIX C—CONTRASTIVE STRESS AWARENESS TASK 80

Aoun, J. & Li, Y. A. (1993). Syntax of scope. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bergsma, W. (2002). Children’s interpretations of Dutch sentences with the focus particle alleen (‘only’), In I. Lasser (Ed.), The Process of Language Acquisition. Proceedings of the GALA 99 Conference, Peter Lang, Frankfurt (Main).
Brown, G., & Yule, G. (1983) Discourse Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carey, M. (2005). Interlanguage phonology: Sources of L2 pronunciation "errors". Retrieved November 2, 2006, from http://www.ling.mq.edu.au/speech/phonetics/phonology/ interlanguage/pronerrors.html
Chao, Y. R. (1968). A grammar of spoken Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Chomsky, N. (1971). Deep structure, surface structure, and semantic interpretation. In D. Steinberg & L. Jacobovits (Eds.), Semantics: an interdisciplinary reader in philosophy, linguistics, and philosophy (pp. 183-216). New York: Cambridge University Press.
Chomsky, N. & Halle, M. (1968). The sound pattern of English. New York: Harper and Row.
Cinque, G. (1993). A null theory of phrase and compound stress. Linguistic Inquiry, 24, 239-297.
Crain, S., Ni. W., & Conway, L. (1994). Learning, parsing and modularity. In C. Clifton, L. Frazier, & K. Rayner (Eds.), Perspectives on sentence processing. Hillsdale, NJ: LEA.
Crain, S. & Thornton, R. (1998). Investigations in universal grammar: A guide to experiments on the Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Drozd, K. F. & van Loosbroek, E. (1998). Dutch children’s interpretation of focus particle constructions. Poster presented at the 23rd annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA.
Ellis, R. (1997). Second language acquisition. Oxford: Oxford.
Feng, S. L. (2003). Prosodically constrained postverbal PPs in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistics, 41, 1085-1122.
Gass, S. & Selinker, L. (Eds.), (1983). Language transfer in language learning. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Gennari, S., A. Gualmini, S. Crain, L. Meroni, & S. Maciukaite. (2001). How adults and children manage stress in ambiguous contexts. Proceedings of 1st Workshop on Cognitive Models of Semantic Processing. University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Gennari, S., L. Meroni, & S. Crain (2004) Rapid relief of stress in dealing with ambiguity. In J. C. Trueswell and M. K. Tanenhaus (Eds.), Approaches to Studying World Situated Language use: Bridging the language-as-product and language-as-action traditions (pp.245-260). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Givón, T. (1976). Topic, pronoun, and grammatical agreement. In Subject and Topic, Charles Li (Ed.), 149-188. New York: Academic Press.
Givón, T. (2001). Syntax (Vol. I, II). Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Göbbel, E. (2001). Focus in triadic constructions. Ms.
Gordon, P. (1996). The Truth-Value Judgment task. In D. McDaniel, C. McKee & H.S. Cairns (Eds.), Methods for assessing children’s syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Grimshaw, J. (1990). Argument Structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gualmini, A., Maciukaite, S. & Crain, S. (2003). Children's insensitivity to contrastive stress in sentences with only. In E. Kaiser & A. Williams (Eds.), Proceedings of the 25th Penn Linguistics Colloquium (pp.87-110). Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania,
Gundel, J & Thorstein, F. (2004). Topic and Focus. Retrieved February 25, 2007, from http://www.sfu.ca/~hedberg/gundel-fretheim.pdf
Gussenhoven, C. (1983). Focus, mode and the nucleus. Journal of Linguistics,19 , 377-417.
Halbert, A., Crain, S., Shankweiler, D. & Woodams, E. (1995). Children's interpretive use of emphatic stress. Poster paper presented at the 8th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Tucson, AZ.
Hawkinson, A.K. & Hyman,L.M. (1974). Hierarchies of natural topic in Shona. Studies in African Linguistics. 5, 147-170.
Huang, C.-T. James; Li, Y.-H. Audrey; and Li, Yafei (To appear). The syntax of Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Jin, S. (1996). An acoustic study of sentence stress in Chinese. Unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, Ohio State University.
Kadmon, N. (2001). Formal Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Kiss, K. E. (1998). Identificational focus versus information focus, Language, 74, 245-273.
Kratzer, A. (1991). The representation of focus. In. von Stechow & D.
Wunderlich, (Eds.), Semantics. An International Handbook of Contemporary Research (pp. 825-834). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Lado, R. (1975). Linguistics across cultures, applied linguistics language teachers. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Lambrecht, K. (1994). Information Structure and Sentence Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Larson, R. K. (1988). On the double object construction. Linguistic Inquiry, 19, 335-391.
Li, C. N. & Thompson, S. A. (1981). Mandarin Chinese: A functional referencegrammar. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Li, Y.-C. (1974). What does ‘disposal’ mean? Features of the verb and noun in Chinese. Journal of Chinese Linguistics 2(2), 200-218. Liu. F. –H. (2006). Dative constructions in Chinese. Language and Linguistics, 7(4), 863-904.
McDaniel, D. & Maxfield, T. (1992). Principle B and contrastive stress. Language Acquisition, 2, 337-358.
Oldin, T. (1989). Language transfer: Cross-linguistic influence in language learning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Paterson, K., Liversedge, S. & Filik, R. (2003). Children's comprehension of sentences with focus particles. Cognition, 89, 263-294.
Pennington, M. C. & Ellis, N. C. (2000). Cantonese speakers' memory for English sentences with prosodic cues. The Modern Language Journal, 84, 372-389.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. (1972). A grammar of contemporary English. London: Longman.
Quirk R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & Svartvik, J. (1985). A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London: Longman.
Reinhart, T (1995). The processing cost of reference-set computation: Acquisition of stress shift and focus. Language Acquisition, 12(2), 109-155
Reinhart, T. (2006). Interface strategies: Optimal and costly computations. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rooth, M. E. (1985). Association with focus. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts.
Rooth, M. E. (1992). A theory of focus interpretation. Natural Language Semantics, 1, 75-116.
Selkirk, E. (1984). Phonology and Syntax: The Relation between Sound and Structure. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Selkirk, E. (1995). Sentence prosody: intonation, stress, and phrasing. In J. A. Goldsmith (Ed.), The Handbook of phonological theory (pp. 550-569). Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Solan, L. (1980). Contrastive stress and children's interpretation of pronouns. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 23, 688-698.
Shyu, S. -I. (2001). Some remark on object movement in Chinese SOV order. Journal of Language and Linguistics. Academia Sinica. 2(1), 93-124.
Shyu, S. -I. & Chang, T. -F. (2005). Stress is not a necessary condition for syntactic focus. Unpublished Manuscript.
Shyu, S. -I. & Kang, Y. -M. (2006). Can sentences with zhi 'only' be disambiguated by contrastive stress? Paper presented at the 33rd LACUS (Linguistic Association of Canada and United States) Forum, University of Toronto.
Shyu, S. -I. (2006). Contrastive stress on the zhi associated arguments in triadic constructions. Paper presented in the Workshop on East Asian Languages. National Sun Yat-sen University.
Shyu, S. -I. (2007a). Chinese adults' acquisition of English contrastive stress on the associated arguments in the triadic constructions. In Tseng, M.Y. (Ed.), Exploring Language at the Interface (pp.9-40). Taipei, Taiwan: Crane Publishing Ltd.
Shyu, S. -I. (2007b). Focus interpretation of the zhi associated arguments in triadic constructions. Paper presented at the Conference on Linguistic Interfaces. University of Ulster, Belfast, UK.
Szendroi, K. (2003). Acquisition evidence for an interface theory of focus. In J. v. Kampen & S. Baauw (Eds.), Proceedings of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition (pp. 457-468). Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Tench, P. (1996). The intonation systems of English. London: Cassell.
Teng, S. H. (1975). A semantic study of transitivity relations in Chinese. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tsao, F. -F. (1987). “A topic-comment approach to the ba construction,” Journal of Chinese Linguistics, 15, 1-54.
Tsao, F.-F. (1990). Sentence and clause structure in Chinese: A functional perspective. Taipei: Student Book Co.
Wason, P. C. (1961). Responses to affirmative and negative binary statements.
British Journal of Psychology, 52, 133-142.
Wasow, T. (2002). Postverbal behavior. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Watanabe, K. (1988). Sentence stress perception by Japanese students. Journal of Phonetics, 16, 181-186.
Xu, L. (2004). Manifestation of information focus. Lingua, 114, 277-299.
Xu, Y. (1999). Effects of tone and focus on the formation and alignment of f0 contours. Journal of Phonetics, 27, 55-105.
Zubizarreta, M. L. (1998). Prosody, focus, and Word Order. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Feng, S. L. (馮勝利) (2000)〈漢語韻律句法學〉 [Prosodic syntax in Chinese] 上海：上海教育出版社。
Fang, M. (方梅) (1995)〈漢語對比焦點的句法表現手段〉，《中國語文》第四期， 279-288頁。
Lee, P. L., Pan, H. H. & Xu, L. J. （李寶倫、潘海華、徐烈炯) (2003)〈對焦點敏感的結構及焦點的語義解釋(上) 〉《當代語言學》第五卷第一期。1-11頁。
Wang, L. (王力) (1947)《中國現代語法》， 台中：藍燈出版社。
Xu, J. & Li, Y. J. (徐杰和李英哲) (1993)〈焦點和兩個非線性語法範疇：「否定」「疑問」〉，《中國語文》第2期。81-92頁。