A Case Study Of Chinese-speaking Children's Use Of Ellipsis

Ellipsis, as a linguistic phenomenon, is a very important aspect in children's language use. If we only see ellipsis from the aspect of grammar, when children begin to speak out the first word, they have already used ellipsis to communicate with adults. According to Li Yuming, when a child is one year to one year six months old, he or she is at the stage of holophrastic sentence. Comparing the child's language at this stage with the target language,his or her syntactic structure is fuzzy, so the paper does not consider children's use of ellipsis before one year six months in the present study. Rules and characteristics in the use of ellipsis are shown in the children's linguistic data, affected by many factors and constraints. At the same time, they make mistakes. All the above points are contents of this thesis.With the employment of literature review method, case study method, comparative analysis method and mathematical statistics method, the study respectively selected 34 sessions from two Mandarin-speaking children MHR from one year six months and five days to five years eleven months and eighteen days; ZHZ from one year six months and five days to five years eleven months and twenty six days. The paper divided ellipsis into subject ellipsis, predicate ellipsis, object ellipsis and attribute ellipsis from the aspect of syntax. It focus on the frequency, characteristic and studies the differences and causes between children's use of ellipsis and adults', similarities and causes between children's use of ellipsis and adults', influences factors, types of misuse and reasons.The major results are as follows:(1) due to the characteristics of Chinese, the highest ratio in the four types of ellipsis is subject ellipsis, which is similar with adults' use of ellipsis;(2) in the early age of children's language development, due to the large input of this kind of sentences such as “what is this?”, “What is that?” and the predicate in judgment sentence can be omitted, which makes the frequency of predicate ellipsis is the second highest in the four types of ellipsis, this is very difference with adults' use of predicate ellipsis;(3) there are three influence factors: input frequency, cognitive level and semantic difficulty;(4) there are four types of misuse in children's use of ellipsis: subject incompleteness, predicate incompleteness, object incompleteness, attribute incompleteness, which bring ambiguity or make mistakes of illogic or unclear meaning. Level of children's cognitive development,language environment, acquisition strategies and speed of talking are reasons for children's misuse of ellipsis.