Research On Chinese Children’s Discourse Structure(6 Years Old)

Discourse ability is a basic human ability.The growth of early childhood discourse ability is related to a person’s life.The research on the development of children’s language ability is a systematic project,and its value lies in exploring the characteristics and laws of the development of children’s speech ability of all ages.Under the guidance of the Chinese speaking structural syntactic theory(Qiu Xuemei,2013),based on the daily utterance tracking corpus of six-year-old children,qualitative labeling and quantitative analysis are used to refine the types of children’s utterance structure and explore the distribution characteristics of six-year-old children’s utterance and the underlying reason.The research steps of this topic are as follows: 1.Proofread the "Chinese Toddlers(6 Years Old)Daily Discourse Tracking Corpus",which has a size of440,000 words,of which 270,000 words are pure children’s corpus.2.Annotate according to the discourse category system to form a "Chinese children(6 years old)daily discourse tagging corpus"(690,000 characters),and revise the discourse category system in the process.3.Extract 16,996 sentences of children’s speech from the "labeled corpus",and make statistics of dialogue structure sentences and subject-predicate structure sentences and subcategories.4.Mark the suspicious phrases or words and special example sentences that appear in the utterance,and establish a "suspicious phrase corpus","suspicious words corpus",and "special example sentence corpus" respectively.5.Establish "Imperative Sentences Annotation Corpus","Exclamation Sentences Annotation Corpus","Interrogative Sentences Annotation Corpus" and "greeting Sentences Annotation Corpus" respectively.The research results of this topic are as follows: from the 270,000-character children’s corpus,a total of 16,996 sentences of children’s discourse structure are extracted.Among them,the topic-comment structure sentence is 7693 sentences(accounting for 45.26%),and there are 62 kinds of discourse structure types;the subject-predicate structure sentence is 6667 sentences(accounting for 39.23%),and there are 5 types of subject-predicate structure,which are divided into actions,feelings,wishes,inspiring and duties.2045 interrogative structure sentences(accounting for 12.03%),5 types of interrogative structure,divided into topic-comment basic + question mark,subject-predicate base + question mark,questioned structure(who,what,where,what type,why),questioning structure and other structures;527 imperative structure sentences(accounting for 3.10%),two types of imperative structures,imperative sentences are divided into imperative structures and imperative structures;exclamation 46 structural sentences(accounting for 0.27%),two types of exclamatory structure,divided into inspiring structure and receiving structure;18 greeting structure sentences(accounting for 0.11%),and 1greeting structure.In addition,there are 13910 sentences in the independent language,and the independent structure types are divided into 8 categories,namely:statement(54.71%)> inquiry(17.40%)> imperative(11.89%)> exclamation(10.78%)> onomatopoeia(3.92%)> greetings(0.91%)> scene(0.27%)> repeat(0.12%).The above statistics show that 6-year-old children’s speech sentences are mainly composed of discourse sentences and subject-predicate sentences(accounting for more than 80%).Among them,the topic-comment structure sentence has the highest appearance rate,followed by the subject-predicate structure sentence,but the difference between them is not obvious.The internal types of topic-comment sentences have obvious advantages in distribution such as sentenced sentences,state sentences,and subject sentences,but the overall discourse structure types present a diversity and balanced distribution.The internal subject-predicate sentences are still dominated by action structures.Secondly,among the other five types of structured sentences,interrogative structured sentences accounted for the highest proportion,while independent structured sentences were mainly composed of statements,exclamations and imperative structures.This study further compared the speech of six-year-old children with the corpus of four-year-old and five-year-old children.Starting from the different internal structures and overall characteristics,it was found that the discourse structure was on the rise,the typical structure of the discourse was obvious,and the discourse structure was rich and gradually scattered.It shows the dynamic development process of 4～6 year-old children’s discourse ability from judgment,description to calculation and evaluation.At the same time,finding out the factors affecting the discourse of six-year-old children is children’s cognitive ability and contextual needs.The results of this research reflect to a certain extent the types and distribution characteristics of the discourse structure of 6-year-old children in Chinese.It can extend the study of discourse in 4-6 years old children and provide ideas and support for exploring the development of children’s discourse ability.