GROWN-UP‘ SYNTAX IN CHILDREN‘S STORYBOOKS

GROWN-UP‘ SYNTAX IN CHILDREN‘S STORYBOOKS

Marjanovic, Tatjana

The study hopes to challenge the view that syntax in children‘s storybooks is custom-made to match the general abilities of young listeners and readers. Reading with an adult mind and eyes prompts the question whether at least some children‘s storybooks make it difficult to draw a line between ‗young‘ and ‗grown-up‘ syntax. The small-scale research was a text-based analysis of three children‘s stories aimed at pre-teen children aged seven through twelve. With a manually handled corpus kept within manageable limits it was possible to determine the presence or absence of syntactic structures associated with advanced language use, i.e. those believed to require considerable experience, knowledge and skill in language production and reception. The main finding to report is that syntax in children‘s stories is little different from what may be informally described as ‗grown-up‘ syntax. The paper also invites the reader to acknowledge the difficult task of balancing a downgraded version of syntax against an urge to tell an engaging story that wants to be read.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2011-05

557