- 84 - 9
So he said, “O-oh footballs.” 10
They were shiny, black and white footballs. 11
And Father Christmas said, 12
“I can’t keep them till next Christmas. when
1314 I must sell them to a worsest team to whom
that never won before.… Here we have five examples of verbal complements, which add information about a given
verbal process, and one non-prepositional example of a nominal complement, that never won before which modifies the noun team. These findings tie in with other studies of grammatical
structure and language modalities. Halliday 1967 discussed the differences between verbal and nominal structures; he observed that nominals allow more information to be packed
into single clauses and facilitate the signalling of links between clauses, hence their importance in scientific and technical writing. Chafe 1982 contrasted formal prose with
dinner table talk and reported that the predominance of nominalizations was one of the most salient aspects of written language when compared with spoken language.
In chapter 2, page 41, we suggested that nominalizations, and complex and compound explicatives, involve a level of syntactic complexity which is beyond the language of infant
school children. Then, on page 39, while talking about external evaluation, we noted that Tannen 1982b describes external evaluation as “a feature of literate-based strategies”
because it makes explicit the whole point of a story. We then commented that there are no examples of external evaluation in the data.
3.7.2.2 Interclausal Complements and Participant Reference
There are several different interclausal syntactic structures which we could look at, such as infinitives, that-complements, and relative clauses, but there are very few of them in our
data and Shvinder provides most of them cf. the that-complement in Story B 1314. Michaels and Collins report that this was true also of their oral-style narratives.
“Interclausal complements enhance cohesion in both spoken and written discourse by explicitly mapping hierarchical relations onto clausal structure; they order two clauses with
respect to one another, and they provide additional information about a given noun phrase” 1984:234. In section 3.6.3.2 1984:75 we talked briefly about the contrast
between “clause-integrating” and “clause-chaining” styles, or strategies, and their correlation with fluency. A “clause-integrating” style is described by Pawley and Syder
- 85 - 1983 as one in which a speaker is “committing himself to grammatical constructions
which require him to take account of the structure of an earlier or later clause when formulating a current one” p. 202. Clearly, these constructions are only used by children
with a literate style. Michaels and Collins’ literate-style narrators used complex nominal syntax to describe a new participant and also later, together with lexical and grammatical
parallelism, when referring back to this character. For example, 7a
there was a man…that was…picking some…pears Twenty-four lines later Jenny recycles the relative clause to confirm that here is the second
mention of the same man. 7b
then…they…walked by the man who gave…wh-who was picking the
pears Their oral-style narrators used independent clauses, a “clause-chaining” strategy, and
prosodic cues, vowel elongation, and a high rise-fall contour to signal that a specific character had been mentioned already.
8a it was about…this man he was um…um…takes some um…peach
- …some…pears off the tree
Twenty-five lines later Merle mentions this character again. 8b
and when that…when he passed by that mâ:n ...the man…the mâ:n came out the tree
Here he uses vowel elongation and a high rise-fall contour on man, instead of embedded nominals, to signal the identity of a major character.
Our narrators do not use either strategy. Shvinder uses a noun phrase when she introduces her participants and pronouns or a definite article when she refers back to them.
1 Once upon a time Father Christmas was looking in his cupboard
2 and he saw this strange, green shiny box.
34 He said, “I didn’t put this in the cupboard.
5 I put something else.”
67 So he went and looked in the box.
- 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
