A Study Of NP Ellipsis In Argumentative Discourse By Native English Speakers

The mastery of discourse knowledge directly affects students' expression ability.Chinese pays more attention to parataxis than English and other languages,so ellipsis is commonly used in textual cohesion.Foreign students often have a poor grasp of the ellipsis,and often make errors.There are few related studies and the content of the research is relatively broad.Based on the existing research,this paper tries to explore the situation of NP ellipsis in the argumentative discourse of English speakers by combining HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus.Research shows that NP ellipsis errors in English speaker's argumentative discourse mainly include two types:absence of ellipsis and over-ellipsis,while the latter accounts for more than 70%of NP ellipsis errors.Each category can be divided into four categories:subject ellipsis,object ellipsis,attributive ellipsis and attributive central ellipsis.And attributive central ellipsis is the most common type,which is more than 50%.The causes of errors include five aspects:negative transfer of mother tongue,excessive generalization of target language,cultural factors,individual factors of learners and teaching factors.In addition,we found that there were few explanations and exercises about NP ellipsis in the textbooks,which also caused errors of foreign students to a certain extent.So we suggest that students should overcome the fear of difficulties,compare languages differences and enrich their learning methods;teachers should improve their comprehensive literacy and adopt reasonable teaching methods;textbooks should balance the arrangement of texts.The teaching practice settings of textbooks should be hierarchical and the summary of ellipsis should be added.