Lexical Statistics And Semantic Classification Of Six - Year - Old Children

The process of Children’s language acquisition is a miniature of the process of human’s language development. Children become more and more social during the process.As a science,Children linguistics develops well in China.From introducing foreign language acquisition theories to building our own ones based on Chinese acquisition facts,from studying the language as a whole system to discussing its every elements,from simple observation and records to relying on the large-scale corpus, the discipline gets much more mature.Under the guidance of the theory of semantic grammar, based on corpus, this research classifies the commonly used words of six children in Chinese in the perspective of the semantic and count up the number of them.First of all,after proofing "the corpus of natural utterances of 6-year-old children (named XX)",which was already built by Li Yao under Bao- jia Li’s direction,this research extracts only the children’s sentences from it and gets 233,000 characters. By segmentation,part-of-speech tagging and screening,finally this research gets 2728 words to build the "glossary of the common words of 6-year-old XX ".To make the glossary suitable for other kids in the same age,this research supplements it according to the parallel glossaries and semantics.Eventually this research forms an universal glossary for the 6-year-old children,and names it as "glossary of the common words of 6-year-old infants"(2891).Then, consulting "the Framework of Semantics of Children’s Lemmas"made by Qi WenHui (2008), this research adjusts the second class and third one in the "Table of Modern Chinese Words Classified by Semantic"(built by Bao-jia Li & Sun Daogong 2011, unpublished).Last also the most important, according to the adjusted table,this research classifies the 2891words.Then compare the result with the glossary of 5-year-old, explore the characteristics of the vocabulary acquisition of six year olds,and analysis them according to the theory of categorization and prototype of Cognitive Linguistics,and the theory of semantic field of Semantic Grammar and so on.After adjusting,there are 7 categories (referential words, statement words, descriptors, qualifiers, marker words, modal words and echo words),32 subcategories and 106 smaller subcategories in the table.And statistics suggest that the 6 years old kid has learned 1195 referential words(4 subcategories,18 smaller ones),886 statement words (9 subcategories,20 smaller ones),363 descriptors (5 subcategories,14 smaller ones),187 qualifiers (4 subcategories,10 smaller ones),93 marker words (3 subcategories,13 smaller ones),185 modal words (3 subcategories,18 smaller ones) and 64 echo words(4 subcategories,13 smaller ones).So far,there is no complete vocabulary table of 6 years old children in ChinaThe mainly result of this research,"glossary of the common words of 6-year-old infants",can make up the deficiency.The glossary is highly persuasive because it is based on Chinese acquisition facts and the large-scale corpus.And furthermore,this research studies and analysis children’s vocabularies from the semantic point of view.It is a valid breaking for the traditional research paradigm,which gives most priority to linguistic forms and ignores the characteristics of children’s language acquisition.This research has counted the total words and new words of 6-year-old children.Furthermore,the research analyzes the characteristics of vocabulary acquisition. So its statistical data and explanations provide corpus-based quantitative and qualitative supports for Children Linguistics.Commonly used words of a child are the core of a man’s whole vocabulary, so the glossary has great referent significance to the second language teaching.In the field of lexicography, it is an effective way to choose commonly used terms for interpretation to improve the dictionary of popularity.The glossary will be an indispensable reference for the future lexicography and its interpretation.