A Comparative Study On English And Mandarin-speaking Children's Person Deixis Application

Person deixis is an important branch of deixis which refers to the encoding of the role of participants or unities in the speech event. Person deixis is one of the languages phenomena,many researchers made studies about the use of person deixis in different style and summarize the pragmatic characteristics; however, few researchers pay attention to person deixis in children's language. Because mastering person deixis accurately is related to context and the role of participants, a complicate process is experienced for children. Therefore, the key point in this research is that how children command person deixis correctly and studies its factors.Corpus-based data analysis method, qualitative analysis method and statistic method are employed to make a study between the Mandarin-speaking and English-speaking children's person deixis. This research analyzes the acquisition time, acquisition order and developing process on Mandarin-speaking children's person deixis by selecting 31 sessions from two Chinese-speaking subjects MHR and ZHZ, then an analysis about two English subjects(LIL and ALE) from the Providence Corpus. The result shows that:(1) the acquisition time of person deixis doesn't coincide with appearance time;(2) the acquisition order of Mandarin-speaking children's person deixis is straight claiming ?wo3 ?ni3 ?ta1?wo3men(ni3men) ?ta1men, however, the English-speaking children's is that I is acquired at first and they is acquired at last, and singular person deixis is prior to plural ones;(3)Acquiring person deixis is a substitute process of using straight claiming by children during which all kinds of misuse between three types of person deixis are occurred. Similarities and differences between English and Mandarin-speaking children's person deixis are found according to comparative cross-sectional study. Similarities are obtained as follows:(1) the acquisition time of person deixis isn't same with its appearance;(2) singular person deixis is acquired earlier than plural ones;(3) the misuse between three kinds of person deixis is occurred for which there is an imitating process on children acquiring person deixis.The differences are followed: at first, the acquisition order of Mandarin-speaking children is I?you? he, meanwhile the third-person deixis is acquired earlier than second ones by English-speaking children; then, except the misuse among three types of person deixis, the misuse between nominative case and objective one is happened during the commandingprocess.The acquisition of children's person deixis has been experienced the process of imitation,misusing all types of person deixis, using them correctly which is influenced by children's cognitive development ability, generative ability, egocentric speech, syntactic structure and the influence of the language exposed to children.