The use of suoyi ‘so’ and jieguo ‘as a result’ in Mandarin-speaking children’snarrative
Kanyu Yeh
Graduate Institute of Linguistics,National Chengchi University, Taiwan
98555005@nccu.edu.tw
Abstract
Children’s narratives have been widely investigated by psycholinguists since
they provided information about children’s development of discourse, cognition andsocialization (Berman & Slobin, 1994; Chang, 2000; Ninio & Snow, 1996). Among
all of the studies on children’s narrative development, Berman and Slobin (1994)
conducted a cross-linguistic study about relating events in narrative. They purposedfour developmental levels of increasing complexity in children’s narrative which aretemporal, causal, constituent, and event complex levels. They suggested that children
at age three reach the first level of linking two situations as simultaneously orsequential in time to form an event. They also have the ability to link situation
combination based on physical causality packaging. However, not until age nine canchildren pay attention to inner states that may be causes to people’s behaviors andalso be able to express both physical and emotional causal relations. The
multifunction of connectives has also been of interests to many researchers (Biq,1990; Schiffrin, 1986, 1992). According to Wang and Huang’s (2006) study, suoyi ‘so’
as the second frequently used connective in Taiwan Mandarin is now also a widelyused discourse marker. Besides the original use of suoyi ‘so’ to mark results, themeaning has extended into various domains, including result denoting, paraphrasing,resumptive, topic initiating, floor holding, floor taking, turn justification and marking
temporal sequence (Hsieh, 1999; Su, 1998; Wang & Huang, 2006; Wen, 2010).
According to Su (1999), young Mandarin speaking children prefer to use jieguo ‘as aresult’ as a general connective to mark not only causal but also temporal relations
between clauses. Based on previous research, the present study intended to investigate
5- and 9-year-old Taiwan Mandarin speaking children’s acquisition of themultifunction of the two causal connectives suoyi ‘so’ and jieguo ‘as a result’ in theirnarrative.
The results showed that Mandarin-speaking children used both the causal
connectives jieguo ‘as a result’ and suoyi ‘so’ in their narratives and they used themdifferently. They used jieguo much more frequently than suoyi when telling story.

Besides, there were also some developmental differences. The use of jieguo decreased
while that of suoyi increased with age. In terms of the multifunction of the two causal
connectives, Mandarin-speaking children used suoyi ‘so’ to mark only results in theirnarratives even until age nine. The other functions of suoyi were not found in thepresent data. This result indicated that the multifunction of suoyi may be acquired
later in language development. Mandarin speaking children may need more advanced
communicative competence to acquire these functions of suoyi ‘so’ and use themappropriately since the complexity of the various functions might be difficult for themto produce during an early age. On the contrary, Mandarin-speaking children as
young as age five used the causal connective jieguo ‘as a result’ to mark bothconsequential and temporal relations when telling story. The portion of resultativefunctions increased while the temporal use decreased with age. In other words,
Mandarin-speaking children tended to use jieguo to mark only consequential relations
as they grow older. The connective jieguo ‘as result’ changed from a relatively
general connective to a specific one which was similar to what Spooren (1997) and Su(1999) suggested that young children tended to mark underspecified relations rather
than specific ones. That is, young children preferred to use general connectives
marking various relations instead of specific connectives mark certain relations.
Moreover, Mandarin-speaking children as young as age five used jieguo also to markcontrast or unexpected plotline in their narrative, which is similar to that of thecontrast markers keshi/danshi ‘but’ in Mandarin. Children used jieguo to imply thefollowing discourse was contrastive to the listeners’ expectations which may further
construct the climax of the plotline.
In sum, Mandarin speaking children in Taiwan used both the causal connectives
suoyi ‘so’ and jieguo ‘as a result’ serving various functions in their narratives.
However, they used them in different ways. Mandarin speaking children as young as
age five had the ability to use jieguo to mark both causal and temporal relations, andmoreover, contrastive relations in their story telling. On the other hand, they usedsuoyi only to mark causal relations even until age nine. The results suggested that
there might be developmental differences between Mandarin speaking children’sabilities to manipulate the multifunction of such connectives or discourse markers,
which would also need to be further examined in different genres of discourse with alarger group of data.

Selected reference
Hsieh, Yvette H.-y. (1999). Coherence via collaboration: a study of Chinese causal
connectives. Working Papers in Linguistics, vol. 2, 157-186.
Wang, C. C. & L. M. Huang. (2006). Grammaticalization of connectives in Mandarin
Chinese: A corpus-based study. Language and Linguistics, 7(4), 991-1016.