A Contrastive Study Of Chinese And English-speaking Children's Acquisition Of Comparative Sentences

There are similarities and differences among everything in the world and the analysis of those is the comparison,which can make human being's cognition more detailed and comprehensive.The externalization of consciousness of comparison is comparative sentence which is one of the sentence patterns commonly used in people's daily communication and also of the signs that mark the maturity and development of child language.Children,s language acquisition is an important interdisciplinary research,and the acquisition of comparative sentences plays an important role in ehildren's language acquisition,which has attracted much attention for a long time.The comparative sentence is an important and effective method to express the consciousness of comparison,which can directly reflect children's comparative cognitive ability and is of great significance to understand the development of children's thinking and cognitive ability.This thesis attempts to discuss children's acquisition of comparative sentences with the guidance of markedness theory.Longitudinal method,statistic method and contrastive analysis method are adopted in this research to analyze the acquisition of four Chinese and English-speaking children's comparative sentences.Thirty-eight observation sessions are selected from Chinese-speaking children MHR(01;06;05-04;11;25)and ZHZ(01;06;05-04;11;26)in order to analyze their whole acquisition of comparative sentences,including initial appearance,acquisition time,use frequency and so on.Likewise,thirty-eight observation sessions are selected from two English-speaking children ADA(02;03;04-04;10;00)and SAR(02;03;05-04;11;26)who are randomly selected from the Brown corpus.At the same time,a contrastive analysis of four children's acquisition of comparative sentences is discussed,which aims at studying children's acquisition differences and similarities and analyzing its reasons.The results are as follows:(1)The use frequency of unequal comparative sentences uttered by both Chinese and English-speaking children is much higher than that of equal comparative sentences and superlative comparative sentences.However,compared with equal comparative sentences and superlative comparative sentences,the frequency of superlative comparative sentences uttered by Chinese-speaking children is higher than that of equal comparative sentences,while it is the opposite for English-speaking children;(2)The acquisition order of both Chinese and English-speaking children's comparative sentences is:unequal comparative sentences?equal comparative sentences?superlative comparative sentences;(3)Chinese-speaking children acquire comparative sentences earlier than English-speaking children;(4)The age of two and a half to three and a half is the rapid development stage of four subjects' comparative sentences,when the semantic and syntactic features of comparative sentences become more complex;(5)At the mature stage of their age of four to five,three types of comparative sentences make a grate improvement,the length of sentences has increased,the semantic content and the grammatical structure have become more various,children can accurately merge three types of comparative sentences;(6)Both Chinese and English-speaking children acquire unmarked adjectives in comparative sentences at first,and marked adjectives in comparative sentences are acquired later.Meanwhile,the use frequency of unmarked adjectives in comparative sentences is higher than that of marked adjectives in comparative sentences;The main reasons affecting children's acquisition of comparative sentences are:(1)characteristics of comparative sentences;(2)cognitive abilities;(3)language input;(4)linguistic environment.This thesis makes an in-depth analysis of the acquisition of Chinese and English-speaking children's comparative sentences in order to to provide references for the strategic adjustment of children's caregivers,language input.