- 86 - description of the footballs which he found in the box and his reaction on
discovering them 11
And Father Christmas said, “… more events where the pronoun he is used consistently
18 So he found this lady
19 and Father Christmas said, “…”
22 The lady just laughed, “Ha, ha, ha.”
23 And Father Christmas said, “Oh, please”
24 So she said, “O.K.…”…
Shvinder uses a full NP when introducing her main character and again after referring to other participants and props numbers 11, 19, 23. The other participant is introduced by
the demonstrative this in 18, a strategy not mentioned by Michaels and Collins, but a notable feature of Labov’s narratives and characteristic of oral-style narratives in general.
So here she and the other subjects use a combination of strategies from both oral and literate styles. Shvinder does use prosodic devices, such as vowel elongation and rise-fall
contours, but she uses them for different purposes. We argue in chapter 6 that she uses them to evaluate the most important points in her narrative.
3.7.2.3 Interclausal Connectives and Causal Relations
In Michaels and Collins’ data the contrast is between lexicalizations, such as so and but, and the use of prosodic cues. Their example is very specific: the form then, with a stressed high
fall, serving “as an implicit intonational signal, functionally equivalent to lexicalized forms, so, therefore, hence”. We have nothing equivalent in our data. Shvinder gives us several
examples of the use of so. In the section quoted above, the so in 18 suggests a causal relationship, but no such relationship was marked in the original. However, this oral-style
use of so, roughly equivalent to saying “now this is what happened next”, is a common feature of conversational narratives and of Labov’s data. We will fill in a little more of the
detail in the following. 1516
So he went out and looked for teams 17
but he couldn’t find not even one team—the worst. 18
So he found this lady
- 87 - We could argue that the so in 18 was used as a contrast to but in 17; if he could not find a
team, at least he found this lady who might be able to find one for him There are four other examples of the use of so in the rest of the story. In two of them there is a clear
causal relationship, and in the other two cases the so means “this is what happened next”.
3.7.2.4 Agent Focus
Michaels and Collins’ example of agent focus in an oral-style narrative occurs in an episode of the film where the two key figures are both boys, and the narrator has to provide a
strategy to cope with the potential ambiguity involved. The narrator uses then with “prosodic marking a low falling pitch as an ad hoc agent shifter to disambiguate reference
relations”. In our stories, there are only two or three characters, and in most cases they are referred to by name, so the situation does not arise. The literate-style speaker “relies on
nominal complements to provide enough identifying information about the two boys to keep them separate”. If some of our subjects were given the “Pear Film” to narrate, they
would possibly run into serious processing problems at this point. However, all subjects, except the two least competent, are able to use full NPs when introducing new participants
and then refer back to them by anaphoric pronouns or the definite article. When there is a shift in agent focus or potential ambiguity the full NP is used. See the comments in the
section on participant reference, pp. 85–86. To sum up: Shvinder uses verbal complements in preference to nominalizations oral-style
strategies; simple nominals, anaphoric pronouns, and the definite article for establishing “co-identity” relations and shifting agent focus oralliterate-style strategies; and
lexicalizations so and but to express causal relations literate-style strategies. Although it is instructive, and even reassuring, to try to compare our findings with those of
other researchers, such as Michaels and Collins, who have elicited similar retellings of narratives of vicarious experience, the exercise has its limitations. The tasks and situations
were not parallel. Michaels and Collins were comparing two distinct groups of speakers, and their results are only insightful and valid within their own particular frame of reference.
Similarly, with our data we were not expecting to find specific differences in discourse style among our speakers, but rather different degrees of competence along one single
continuum which exhibits features from both oral and literate narrative traditions. Obviously, the syntactic structures described above contribute to this notion of
competence and allow us to characterize it in quantifiable and meaningful terms. But in the
- 88 - final analysis, to move from a study of the narrative texts to an assessment of their youthful
creators’ narrative competence demands more than the mere listing and counting of structures—it demands understanding and intuition. We are ultimately seeking to answer
the questions: What makes a good story? and Why is one story judged to be “better”, or more pleasurable and meaningful to the hearers, than others in the set? Soundness of structure and
aesthetic worth are both important factors in any such assessment, as is evaluation which is the central topic of this thesis and the one we come back to in the next chapter.
3.8 Implications for Second Language Acquisition
