- 1 - CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
The focus of this thesis is the development of narrative skills in young non-native speakers of English and, in particular, the place of evaluation in these emerging discourses. How
children acquire language is one of the central issues in linguistics: researchers, such as C. Chomsky 1969, Brown 1973, and Bowerman 1973, 1979, 1982, 1985, have looked at
syntactic development; others, such as E. Clarke 1983 and Wales 1986, have studied lexical development; some, such as McTear 1985 and Foster 1986, have considered
pragmatic development and a few, such as Kernan 1977, Umiker-Sebeok 1979, Peterson and McCabe 1983, Kemper 1984, Bamberg 1987, and Bamberg and Damrad-Frye
1991, have concentrated on narrative development. In choosing one particular aspect of child language acquisition for an in-depth study they are, nevertheless, mindful of one of
the main goals of linguistics, which is “to discover what it is about language and the human organism that allows almost all children to learn a native language” Foster 1990.
Foster and the other researchers cited above were concerned with the acquisition of a first language, whereas our interest is in second-language acquisition, but are the acquisition of a
first language and a second language so very different? In making some direct comparisons between evaluations in L1 and L2 narratives from children of comparable ages, we seek to
show that they are not; the L1 subjects may be ahead of their L2 counterparts, but both groups seem to be following a similar path. But why choose narratives as a medium for the
investigation of language development? The simple answer is that they are relatively self- contained discourses which are amenable to transcription and analysis and that, as a genre,
narratives are known and appreciated by most young children. Whatever model of analysis we care to choose, the basic components of the narrative situation remain the same: we
find a tale, a teller, and a hearer. We will take these components in turn and use them as a launching-pad from which to discuss three important strands that will be seen running
through this work: 1 the narrative texts and their structure, 2 the art of storytelling and the acquisition of narratives, and 3 narratives as socially situated events.
1.1 The Narrative Texts
The data consist of forty-five narratives produced by eight Panjabi second-language English speakers aged five years seven months to seven years nine months, and nine
narratives by first-language English speakers of comparable ages. The actual collection of
- 2 - the data will be discussed in section 1.3. Once recorded and transcribed, the data were
analysed using a modified version of Labov’s model, often referred to in the literature as “high-point analysis.” Labov and Waletzky 1967 and Labov 1972a present an analysis of
clause structures which relates them directly to their functions in the narrative; the basic distinction Labov makes is between the referential function of narrative clauses as a means
of sequentially recapitulating past events and the evaluative function of clauses as a means of articulating the point of the story from the narrator’s perspective. It is this evaluative function
of particular clauses which is, as the title suggests, the subject of this thesis. According to Bamberg and Damrad-Frye 1991:
Evaluative comments not only function as links between sequential events, but at the same time - and more importantly - they point to the global hierarchical perspective from
which the narrative gains coherence. Therefore, they give “meaning” to the individual events and actions. Put more broadly, shifts between action descriptions and evaluative
comments signal a shift in narrative orientation from a focus on the organization of the particulars to a focus on the organization of the whole see Bamberg, 1987, for details on
the organization of part-whole relationships. Therefore, from the organization of the whole, one can understand why the reported events are organized the way they are, i.e.
what the point of the narrative is at this stage in the conversationdiscourse. Bamberg and Damrad-Frye 1991:691
As with Labov and Waletzky 1967 and Labov 1972a, Bamberg and Damrad-Frye start from the analysis of linguistic forms, but they do not use Labov’s four evaluative
categories—1 intensifiers, 2 comparators, 3 correlatives, and 4 explicatives—for the treatment of internal evaluation, nor do they differentiate between internal and external
evaluation. Instead, they set up five evaluative categories which overlap, rather than coincide, with those of Labov. We follow Labov more closely, for even though, like Bamberg and
Damrad-Frye, we extend the notion of evaluation to cover third-person narratives, we do, nevertheless, retain the Labovian categories, simply adding new members to them.
What we are seeking to do certainly comes within the realm of discourse analysis andor text analysis. Crystal’s Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics third edition 1991 has the
following to say about texts:
- 3 - Texts are seen as language units which have a definable communicative function,
characterised by such principles as COHESION, COHERENCE and informativeness, which can be used to provide a FORMAL definition of what constitutes
their identifying textuality or texture. p. 350 He also notes that some linguists see “‘text’ as a notion which applies to SURFACE
STRUCTURE, whereas ‘discourse’ applies to DEEP STRUCTURE”. Others, “from the opposite viewpoint,…have defined ‘text’ as an abstract notion, ‘discourse’ being its
REALISATION” p. 350. Clearly, we are dealing with surface structure forms and we are obviously viewing evaluation as a cohesive device, following the Hallidayan approach to
grammatical analysis Halliday 1971, Halliday and Hasan 1976. Halliday uses the term cohesion to refer to those surface-structure features which link different parts of sentences or
larger units of discourse together. Comparators, correlatives, and explicatives involve a significant complication in the syntax
of the narrative clause, and Labov seems to equate evaluation with syntactic complexity and departures from the “fundamental simplicity of narrative syntax” 1972a:377.
However, there are two important questions we need to ask here; these are: 1 Is there any EVIDENCE in the data for the development of “evaluative syntax” with age and increasing language
experience and proficiency? and 2 How does the development of evaluative syntax correlate with OTHER indicators of syntactic complexity, such as the amount of subordination used for purposes other than
evaluation? Then, if we turn from the hierarchical ordering of evaluative clauses to the linear ordering of narrative clauses along a time line, we find that the ability to describe events in
sequence is also an essential ingredient of narration. So are there any indications in the data that there is a developmental pattern in the areas of sequencing and plot construction? And how do these correlate
with differences observed between subjects in the use of evaluative devices? We seek to address these and other related questions in the chapters that follow.
Finally, we need to justify our adoption of the whole notion of evaluation as a discrete entity. Quastoff 1980 criticises Labov for not making clear exactly how evaluative
elements are to be identified and categorized; in other words, the implication is that Labov presents us with a brilliantly simple idea without bothering to convince us of its validity by
spelling out the details. One of our aims, then, is to validate the Model as a suitable instrument for assessing the narrative texts of young second-language learners. Because of
the inevitability of overlap between the referential and evaluative functions in narrative and the problem of deciding what a narrator’s attitudes and intentions really are, there will
- 4 - always be unclear cases; but there will also be many unambiguous examples with which to
test the Labovian distinction between evaluative and narrative clauses.
1.2 The Art of Storytelling and the Acquisition of Narratives
