Over the past years studies have pointed out that 5 to 6-year-old children are able to use complex sentences in their oral language. Complex sentences may contain different kinds of subordinate or embedded clauses suc...Over the past years studies have pointed out that 5 to 6-year-old children are able to use complex sentences in their oral language. Complex sentences may contain different kinds of subordinate or embedded clauses such as noun clauses, adverbial clauses or relative clauses, which again may be respectively divided into smaller units in terms of function and form. It is interesting therefore to investigate how subordinate clauses are applied by 5 to 6-year-old Chinese-speaking children. The present study, which is based on the verbal responses of 10 Taiwan Residents upper-level kindergarteners aged from 5.5 to 6.5 years, aims to investigate specifically how two kinds of subordinate clauses, namely noun and relative clauses, are applied in children＇s speech. Data analysis shows that of the 4 kinds of noun clauses, only object noun clauses are applied by the child-respondents. With their much more complex syntactic constructions, noun clauses, compliment noun clauses and appositive noun clauses do not appear in their oral responses at all. Concerning relative clauses and their derived participle phrases, none of the respondents apply any V＋的＋N construction in their verbal responses. The VO＋的＋N construction is used by 7 respondents, while the S＋的＋N construction is used by 5 respondents.展开更多
文摘Over the past years studies have pointed out that 5 to 6-year-old children are able to use complex sentences in their oral language. Complex sentences may contain different kinds of subordinate or embedded clauses such as noun clauses, adverbial clauses or relative clauses, which again may be respectively divided into smaller units in terms of function and form. It is interesting therefore to investigate how subordinate clauses are applied by 5 to 6-year-old Chinese-speaking children. The present study, which is based on the verbal responses of 10 Taiwan Residents upper-level kindergarteners aged from 5.5 to 6.5 years, aims to investigate specifically how two kinds of subordinate clauses, namely noun and relative clauses, are applied in children＇s speech. Data analysis shows that of the 4 kinds of noun clauses, only object noun clauses are applied by the child-respondents. With their much more complex syntactic constructions, noun clauses, compliment noun clauses and appositive noun clauses do not appear in their oral responses at all. Concerning relative clauses and their derived participle phrases, none of the respondents apply any V＋的＋N construction in their verbal responses. The VO＋的＋N construction is used by 7 respondents, while the S＋的＋N construction is used by 5 respondents.
