An Investigation into the Omission of Chinese Object Errors by Japanese and Korean Learners — An Analysis Based on the HSK Dynamic Writing Corpus

Abstract

Using the HSK Dynamic Composition Corpus 3.0, this study examines 541 instances of object omission in Chinese compositions written by Japanese and Korean learners. The screened sample contains 277 instances from Japanese learners and 264 from Korean learners. Nominal objects account for 487 cases (90.02%), including 325 nouns and noun phrases (60.07% of the full sample), whereas predicative objects account for 54 cases (9.98%). The errors cluster around common verbs, recoverable referents, and constructions in which one noun phrase serves more than one syntactic or semantic function. These patterns suggest gaps in learners' knowledge of verb argument structure and the discourse conditions that license omission. Crosslinguistic influence may contribute, but the corpus does not support reducing the pattern to a simple SOV and SVO contrast. The paper proposes teaching verbs with typical objects and constructions, comparing acceptable ellipsis with incomplete written clauses, and extending correction from isolated sentences to connected discourse.