Abstract

Fairy tale, as a kind of literary genre, is an important reading material for children. Previous researches study fairy tale from the perspective of literary comparison, literary development and linguistics. Some researches make comment on the writer or their works or both. But a few researches have been done from the perspective of cognitive representational categories. This research will study the statistical characteristics of fairy tales from this perspective. The statistics used in the study of fairy tale can be more objective, more effectively to show the language characteristics of fairy tale. Two typical fairy tales, Peter Pan and Wendy and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz will be used as research materials. The research will mark these two fairy tales from color terms, time phrases, number pf places, numbers, characters and repetition of sentences six aspects. After annotation and statistics, Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test will be used for data analysis. The research found that the two rankings of the values do not differ significantly from each other, suggesting that there is a typical distribution of the observed items in fairy tales. According to the statistic results, the research discusses about the statistic characteristics of fairy tale in detail.

Key Words: Fairy tale, statistic characteristic, cognitive representational categories

Contents

Abstract

摘  要

1-Introduction-2

1.1-The aim of the thesis-2

1.2-The Organization of the thesis-3

2-Literature Review-3

2.1-Fairy tale-3

2.1.1 Previous studies on fairy tales-4

2.2-Fairy Tale and Children’s language development-5

3-Methodology-7

3.1-Material-7

3.1.1 Peter Pan and Wendy-7

3.1.2 The Wonderful Wizard of Oz-7

3.2-Research Method-8

3.3-Data Collection-9

4-Discussions-10

4.1-Discussion about the research results-10

4.1.1 Color Terms-10

4.1.2 Time phrases-11

4.1.3 Number of Places-12

4.1.4 Number words-12

4.1.5 Repetition of words and sentences-13

4.1.6 Description of characters-14

4.2-Research results and children psychology-15

5-Conclusion-17

5.1-Research Implication-17

5.2-Limitation and Suggestions for further study-18