- 42 - It [i.e. internal evaluation] resides in all levels of verbalization such as expressive
phonology, speeding up or slowing down, repetition, lexical choice and so on. Direct quotation is a common form of internal evaluation. By putting words in the mouth of the
characters, the teller communicates what happened from inside the story. Nonetheless, by deciding what words to put in the character’s mouth, the teller is building the story
towards the desired point. 1982b:8 Labov does not include direct speechquotation in his table of devices, nor does he
mention single appositives which are also clearly evaluative. Before concluding this section, it is important to state that the presence of these particular
devices does NOT mean that they are invariably used in an evaluative way. In the transcriptions of the data explained in chapter 4 they have been recorded as if this were
the case, i.e. the transcriptions have been tackled almost as a mechanical exercise. In chapters 6 and 7, we show that sometimes they are used evaluatively, but often they are
not, and we hope to be able to justify our conclusions by a detailed discussion of the data and the other factors which are involved in making such decisions about evaluation.
2.4.5 A Justification for the Approach
It goes without saying that the Labovian notion of “evaluation” has not been without its critics; as Bamberg 1987 reports, “it does not seem clear as to how exactly evaluative
elements in the narrative could be identified and categorized” p. 6. The same point is made in Quasthoff 1980, and it is a valid one. Yet, at the same time, we cannot deny the
usefulness of the notion itself just because its manifestations are difficult to pin down andor quantify. Bamberg also quotes criticisms of the Labov model on a second count:
the specialized nature of the data it was produced to handle. Another weak point seemed to have been that high-point analysis is the product of
inductive generalizations of personal accounts of very special situations, namely life- threatening “adventures”. It has been argued that these kinds of situations do not require
any further analyses of the interactive situation andor the audience, factors that usually contribute to the narrative’s structure. Thus, high-point analysis seems to leave out the
interactive quality of narrative structure. Bamberg 1987:6 Labov does a bit more than simply draw general inferences from particular instances of a
limited type of language behaviour. His model is worthy of wider application. In fact, the
- 43 - basic distinction he makes between the referential and evaluative functions of narratives
has proved to be a very helpful one in analysing both written and oral texts cf. Quasthoff 1980; Quasthoff and Nikolaus 1981; Silva-Corvalán 1983; Schiffrin 1981; Wolfson 1982.
High-point analysis has also “had important impact on the analysis of children’s narratives”. So, in a sense we are attempting nothing new, except that we are applying it to
the texts of young non-native speakers of English. This would be an appropriate place to discuss in more detail some of the studies which
have made use of high-point analysis and to report briefly on their findings: Kernan 1977; Umiker-Sebeok 1979; Peterson and McCabe 1983; Kemper 1984.
Kernan analysed eighteen conversational stories from girls between the ages of 7 and 14 according to story components derived by high-point analysis. His findings can be
summarised as follows: he noted a general increase with age in children’s ability to demarcate narrative boundaries; the older children seemed “to be more interested in
elaborating the background information necessary to a proper interpretation and understanding of the narrative” than did the younger children 1977:99. Again, only the
older children clearly emphasized the complications of their narratives so that these would become more prominent as “high-points”. Younger subjects more often introduced the
characters by name or “narrator-perspective tags”, such as my neighbour, while older subjects rarely used the name by itself.
Umiker-Sebeok 1979 studied spontaneous narratives from children aged 3, 4, and 5 in the context of ongoing conversations within a preschool setting. A narrative was defined as,
“any verbal description of one or more past events” p. 92, although it had to be clearly signalled that “something happened”. The 3-year-olds produced “narratives” of one or two
clauses, containing a “complication” section with a possible “introduction”. Evaluations were very rare, but if they were used they were either “comparisons” or “intensity-
quantity” characterizations. Most narratives were about events that had just happened and were limited to the immediate environment. The 4-year-olds produced two or three clauses
and these narratives often contained an “orientation” as well as the introduction and complication section. Interestingly, Umiker-Sebeok found less evaluation in the narratives
of the 4-year-olds than in those of the 3-year-olds. The narratives of the
- 44 - 5-year-olds were far more structured: they employed abstracts, result components, and
various types of evaluation, as well as those components they had used previously. Also, they no longer confined themselves to events which took place within the school setting.
Umiker-Sebeok’s study addresses the question of speaker-addressee relationships and how these affect the kinds of narrative structures children produce. She reports that the listeners
to the narratives of the three-year-olds most commonly showed a lack of interest “both from the point of view of relevance of the story to himself and to the conversational
discourse” p. 106. In contrast, the listeners to the 5-year-old narrators often requested more information regarding the events or characters mentioned in the narrative and quite
frequently responded to them by producing another narrative of their own. Thus, the speaker-listener interaction becomes a major factor in shaping the structure of the child’s
narrative, because it requires elaborations of some of the details or the addition of information from the personal experience of the speaker or listener cf. also the study
conducted by Quasthoff 1983. Kemper’s 1984 analyses of stories told by children between two and ten years of age and
Peterson and McCabe’s 1983 study of the stories of ninety-six subjects between the ages of 3-and-a-half and 9-and-a-half, can be taken together as two parallel studies; they use a
variety of methods but come to very similar conclusions about the developmental routes children take in their acquisition of narrative skills:
The stories of 2-, 3-, and 4-year-olds do not have identifiable high points; only 33 percent were judged to have such a point. In contrast, for older children, 93 percent of the stories
have a central focus, or high point. Kemper 1984:112 With age, children develop the classic adult pattern of narration at least among their
longest narratives, so that by 6 years it is the most prevalent form. Prior to this, the youngest children jump from one event to another in telling about what must have been an integrated
experience. At age 5, they end their narratives at the high point. But after that, children build to a high point and resolve it in classic form. Peterson and McCabe 1983:61f
None of these studies deal with evaluation directly or exhaustively, but they do mention it and produce evidence that children as young as 3 may use “comparisons” comparators
and “intensity-quantity” intensifiers. So if, for the sake of argument, only one in eight of our subjects uses evaluation it is still worth talking about; we then need to explain why the
- 45 - other seven do not use it. Labov indicates that evaluation comes late in the acquisition
programme: The late development in the use of evaluative syntax appears to be general to all
subcultures…It is surprising that this use of complex syntax in narrative should fall so far behind competence in ordinary conversation. 1972a:395
It is clear that every child [presumably over the age of ten] is in possession of the basic narrative syntax: it is also true that children know how to use gestures, quantifiers,
repetition, negatives, futures, modals and because clauses. The question is whether they know how and when to use these devices for specific purposes in the course of telling a
story. 1972a:393 Thus, he seems to be saying that while the devices appear in syntax early, their evaluative
use in narrative only comes later. But how does this apply to second-language acquisition? Schumann 1978, Anderson 1981, and Baynham 1988 note the “restricted” nature of
some L2 syntax.. Anderson refers to it as “pidginized” and states that: In “normal” second language acquisition, pidginization is probably, as Schumann
describes it, characteristic of all early second language acquisition. But a second language learner who has ample access to native-speaker input…will pass rapidly through those
early stages, and his linguistic development will proceed as “depidginization” towards the native target. 1981a:193
At what stage in the process does evaluative syntax appear? Is its use an indication of depidginization? These, and other related issues, will be discussed in detail in chapter 8.
The effects of the speaker-addressee relationship on the kinds of narrative structures that children produce is also a key factor. Information is being shared: how does the addressee
respond? With lack of interest or spellbound attention? Labov’s thesis is simple: if the narrative is evaluated, the hearer will listen attentively; if not, she will manifest some
degree of non-involvement and fidget with the nearest distracting object that comes to hand. This is too simplistic as we shall hope to demonstrate in the next section.
2.4.6 Evaluation and Plot Construction
