A Corpus-based Study on the Sequence of Zǐ and Ér in Chinese

• Main Authors: Wang, Wen-Hung, 王文宏
• Other Authors: Cheng, Ying
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2017
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/v8v3gz

碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 中國語文學系所 === 105 === In different teaching materials of Teaching Chinese as a second Language，“Zǐ”(子) and “Ér”(兒) are designed differently. Not all meanings of Zǐ and Ér are included and taught in these materials. We take Corpus linguistic approach to analyze phonology, morphology and semantics of Zǐ and Ér. Then we follow theories and applications of Teaching Chinese as a second Language to build a pedagogical sequence which ranked meanings by frequency. Finally we integrated the sequence with results of phonology and morphology to create an instruction of Zǐ and Ér. Phonologically, Zǐ and Ér can be recognized as content words and function words by their pronunciations, but there are exceptions caused by the evolution of phonology. Morphologically, both Zǐ and Ér have “Y+Zǐ / Ér” and “Zǐ / Ér + X” structures. The parts of speech of Ér’s morphological components are more complicated than Zǐ’s. Semantically, the sequence of Zǐ and Ér are different from our expectations. According to former researches, function words are more difficult than content words and should be taught after content words. But the result showed the semantic frequency of function words are higher than that of content words. We analyzed semantic frequency of The 8000 Vocabulary List created by “Steering Committee for the Test of Proficiency-Huayu”, and 3 most commonly used Chinese teaching materials in Taiwan. Compared with the result of native speaker corpora, we found there are some significant differences. Therefore, we adjusted the sequence based on results of the three parameters above and created an advisable semantic instruction. Additionally, we observed Chinese learner corpora for the usage of Zǐ and Ér and found orthographic errors of Zǐ. Finally, following the results of the above analyses, we gave pedagogical suggestions of Zǐ and Ér.