Abstract
The present study examines the development of complex sentences with non-finite clause combining with particular focus on clause chaining, in narratives of 40 Turkish-speaking 4- to 11-year-olds and six adults elicited by a wordless picture book. Results show a gradual increase by age in the variety of clauses combined, the length of the complex sentences and their frequency of use. Clause chains formed with converbal clauses are the earliest and most frequent type of clause combinations, already present in 4-year-olds' complex sentences with 1-non-finite clause. Older children's and adults' 2- or 3-non-finite clause complex sentences consist of some combinations of adverbial, complement, relative and converbal clauses. Developmentally, clause chains establish first, aspectual-temporal continuity, then temporal-causal continuity. Sentence-internal and cross-sentence-boundary referential continuities are present early, from age 4 onwards. These findings are discussed in terms of the demands of narrative organization as well as the syntactic and semantic complexity of the clause combination devices in Turkish.
Highlights
Discourse, conversational or narrative, revolves around one or more topics
4-yearolds and older children did not differ significantly, the means show that starting at age 5 there is a gradual increase in the variety of verbs used by each age group (M4-years = 20.80, M5- years = 26.70, M8- years = 29.40, M11- years = 28.30, Madults = 38.00) suggesting that the verb diversity of 4-year-olds is restricted as compared to that of older children, whose verb diversity, in turn, is not as extensive as that of adults
We investigated the development of complex sentences with non-finite clauses of varying degrees of dependency and embedding in the narratives of Turkishspeaking 4- to 11-year-olds and adults
Summary
Speakers and listeners co-construct a topic in order to achieve a coherent account of what is at issue (Ervin-Tripp and Küntay, 1997). In narratives it is the task of the speaker to create coherence by organizing events in accordance with a goal motivated by the cognitive and affective states of the actors engaged (Labov and Waletzky, 1967; Bruner, 1990). Among the primary skills that children have to acquire in order to become effective conversationalists or narrators are linking the sequence of events temporally and causally and making clear reference to actors so that the listener can follow who is doing what to whom. To effect connectivity in discourse, children have to master the clause combining and referent-tracking devices of their language
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