The Analysis of the Discourse Markers in the Narratives Elicited from Persian-speaking Children

Document Type: Research Paper

Author

Department of English, Allameh Tabatabaee University,Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Discourse markers (DMs) are linguistic elements that index different relations and coherence between units of talk. Most research on the development of these forms has focused on conversations rather than narratives. This article examines age and medium effects on use of various discourse markers in pre-school children. Fifteen normal Iranian monolingual children, male and female, participated in this study. They were divided into three age groups (4-5, 5-6, 6-7). Two tests, story production and story re-production (retelling), based on two different story books were used to elicit the children's narratives.  This study shows that the functions of DMs within the oral narrative context follow neither from their usual meanings nor from their usual discourse functions in other contexts. These markers just help to continue the narrative procedure. Narrative experts illustrate how DMs initiate and conclude narrative action, how they guide listeners to follow their interruption and sequence of narrative elements. The results showed no specific difference on the kind of DM being used regarding the age of the participants; furthermore, in terms of the number of utterances and also DMs, children overall behaved differently when they were asked to retell a story, comparing to the time when they were asked to produce a story.

Keywords

References

Bennett-Kastor, T. (1986).Cohesion and predication in child narrative. Journal of Child Language, 13, 353-370.

Brinton, L. (1996). Pragmatic markers in English: Grammaticalization and discourse functions. New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Bloom, L., Lahey, M., Hood, L., Lifter, K. &Fiess, K. (1980). Complex sentences: Acquisition of syntactic connectives and the semantics relations they encode.Journalof Child Language, 7, 235-261

Chafe, W. (1980). The Pear Stories: cognitive, cultural, and linguistic aspects of narrative production. Norwood, NJ: Ablex

Fraser, B. (1988). Type of English discourse marker.ActaLinguisticaHungarica, 38, 19-33.

Fraser, B. (1996). Pragmatic markers. Pragmatics, 6, 167-190

Greenfield, P. & Dent, C. (1982).Pragmatic factors in children's phrasal coordination.Journal of Child Language. 9, 425-443

Halliday M.A.K. &Ruqaiya, H. (1967).Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

Jansonius, K. &Roelofs, M. (2007).Semantisch en pragmatischeontwikkeling en semantisch en pragmatischestoornissenbijkinderen.Reader Seminar Op zoeknaarSemantisch          Pragmatischestoornissen. Amsterdam, The Netherlands:Pro- education

Hatami, L. (2000). Mamali wants to be a doctor, Saviz publication

Jeremy, R. (1978). Use of coordinate sentences with the conjunction 'and5 for describing     temporal and locative relations between events.Journal of Psycholinguistic Research           7, 135-150.

Koike, K. (1996). The countermeasures against coastal hazards in Japan.GeoJournal 38(3), 301-312.

Labov, W. &Waltzky J. (1967). Narrative analysis: Oral versions of personal experience. In June Helm, ed., (2001) Essays on the verbal and visual arts, 12-44.Seattel, WA: University of Washington Press.

Kyratzis, A. & Ervin-Tripp, S. (1999). The development of discourse markers in peer interaction.Journal of Pragmatics 31: 1321-1338.

Labove, W. (1972).Language in the inner city. Philadelphia, PA:University of Pennsylvania Press. (354) The transformation of experience in narrative syntax)

Lakoff, R. (1973). Questionable answerable question. In BrajKachru, Robert B. Lees, YakovMalkiel, A Angelina Pietrangeli and Sol Sporta, eds., Papers in honor of Henry and Renee Kahane, 453- 467. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.

Louwerse, M.M. & Mitchell H.H. (2003). Towards a taxonomy of a set of discourse markers in dialog: A theoretical and computational l linguistic account. Discourse Processes, 35(3), 199-239.

Merritt, D., & Liles, B. (1989). Narrative analysis: clinical applications of story generation and story retelling. Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 54, 438 - 447.

Minami, M. (1998). Politeness markers and psychological complements: Wrapping-up devices in Japanese oral personal narratives. Narrative Inquiry, 8(2), 351-371.

Miracle, W.C. (1991).Discourse markers in Mandarin Chinese. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbus: The Ohio State University

Norrick, N. R. (1998). Retelling stories in spontaneous conversation. Discourse processes, 25, 75-97.

Norrick, Neal R. (2001). On the Conversational Performance of Narrative Jokes: Toward an account of Timing. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. 14(3), 255-274.

Östman, C. (1982). Nematocysts and taxonomy in Laomedea, Gonothyraea and Obelia(Hydrozoa, Campanulariidae).Zool. Scripta, 8, 5-12.

Peterson, C. (1986). Semantic and pragmatic uses of „but‟.Journal of Child Language 13,583-590.

Peterson, C. & McCabe, A. (1985).A naturalistic study of the production of causal connectives by children.Journal of Child Language 12, 145-159

Peterson, C. & McCabe, A. (1987). The structure of AND coordinations in children's narratives. Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 16(5), 467-490

Peterson, C. & McCabe, A. (1988).The connective and as discourse glue.First Language, 8, 19-28

Resalat, M. (2003).Tipiti, the little chick.Afra Publications.

Ripich, D. N., & Griffith, P. L. (1988). Narrative abilities of children with learning disabilities and nondisabled children: story structure, cohesion and propositions.Journal of LearningDisabilities, 21(3), 165-173.

Schiffrin D. (1987).Discourse Markers. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Shapiro, L.R. & Hudson, J. A. (1991). Tell me a make-believe story: Coherence and cohesion in young children's picture-elicited narratives. Developmental Psychology 27(6), 960-974

Shapiro, L. R., & Hudson, J. A. (1997).Coherence and cohesion in children’s stories. In J.Costermans& M. Fayol (Eds.), Processing interclausalrelationships: Studies in the production and comprehension of text (23–48). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum

Strömqvist, S., Nordqvist, Å.,&Wengelin, Å. (2003). Writing the frog story:Developmental and cross-modal perspectives. In S. Strömqvist& L. Verhoeven (Eds.), Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ:Lawrence   Erlbaum Associates.

Wierzbicka A. (2002). Australian cultural scripts-bloody revisited. Journal of Pragmatics, 34, 1167–1209.

Journal of English Language Pedagogy and Practice

Volume 6, Issue 12
Winter and Spring 2013
Pages 159-173

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics