Abstract
ABSTRACT According to Bakhtin, polyphonic dialogism, a general principle for advancing knowledge, is well instantiated in the literary novel, and more generally in narratives, where different ‘voices’ can find expression. Accordingly, in this paper we analyzed picture-based narratives constructed by thirty 5-to-8-year-old French-speaking children, produced before and after a conversation on the causes of the events. The analysis focused on children’s ability to make different voices heard, particularly the voices of the characters which children made heard not only through direct or reported discourse forms, but also through the expression of their inner states such as beliefs, intentions and feelings. Results show a development in children’s ability to make these voices heard in their narratives, as well as a facilitating role of the conversational exchange on their expression. It will be argued that these results provide support to the central place that dialogue occupies in the overall Bakhtinian approach.
Highlights
According to Bakhtin (1986 [1979]), discourse genres are learnt at the same time as the lexical and structural forms of the language through everyday dialogic interactions between the self and others
Those that bring forth different points of view, are a central means for advancing understanding and knowledge, as well as for attaining the human characteristics of selfconsciousness. This general principle is consistent with the interactional and functionalist approaches to language acquisition which have shown the beneficial effects of conversational functioning on the acquisition of different aspects of language knowledge and use (CLARK, 2018; SALAZAR ORVIG, 2017; VENEZIANO, 2000). Another central point of the Bakhtinian approach1 was to show that different discourse genres can coexist within the same overall text, of which the literary novel was taken as a particular object of study (BAKHTIN, 1986 [1979])
As specified in the ‘data analysis’ section above, here we focused on the voice of the author, on the voice of the narrator-as-observer and on the characters’ voices
Summary
According to Bakhtin (1986 [1979]), discourse genres are learnt at the same time as the lexical and structural forms of the language through everyday dialogic interactions between the self and others. Another central point of the Bakhtinian approach was to show that different discourse genres can coexist within the same overall text, of which the literary novel was taken as a particular object of study (BAKHTIN, 1986 [1979]) Within this approach, the novel is a ‘complex’ discourse genre in which several discourse types, and even languages, are imbricated and where different ‘voices’, that of the author, of the narrator and of the characters, find expression within a dynamic and unfinalized dialogue, namely, a dialogue where each intervention is seen as a reaction to a previous intervention and is projected towards a subsequent reaction, with no first nor final word being possible. When feelings, intentions and thoughts are expressed to make the voices of the characters of the story heard, this is considered a second order, more complex type of discourse. The children were developing in a typical way
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