Mastering analytical writing involves the proficient use of varied later-acquired grammatical, lexical and discourse forms and functions. Developmental studies have identified specific linguistic features as diagnostic of increasing proficiency. This study examines how these features change throughout educational levels and before and after the implementation of a set of classroom activities aimed at homogenizing participants' pedagogical input while raising their awareness of analytical texts' main functions. Two hundred and twelve Spanish speakers from primary, secondary and university levels participate in the study, each producing two analytical texts. The corpus consists of 424 texts produced on the same topic. Results indicate that not all the features pertaining to the same domain show identical changes across educational levels or are identically sensitive to pedagogical work. Productivity measures increase with educational level and after pedagogical work, except for university students. Most lexical, syntactic and discourse-level measures improve with educational level, though their sensitivity to pedagogical work is not straightforward. Findings suggest the need to evaluate writing quality at a high level of granularity.
RESUMENEl dominio de la escritura analítica requiere un uso avanzado de diversas funciones gramaticales, léxicas y discursivas de adquisición tardía. Los estudios evolutivos han identificado determinados aspectos lingüísticos como indicadores de un dominio creciente. En este estudio se analiza el cambio que experimentan esos aspectos en diferentes niveles educativos y antes y después de la implementación de una serie de actividades en el aula, diseñadas para homogeneizar la exposición pedagógica de los participantes e incrementar sus conocimientos de las características de los textos analíticos. En el estudio participaron 212 estudiantes hispanohablantes de educación primaria, secundaria y educación superior; cada uno de ellos produjo dos textos ARTICLE HISTORY
The distribution of passive constructions is examined in written texts produced by native speakers of five Languages (Dutch, English, French, Hebrew, and Spanish), from four Age groups (aged 9–10, 12–13, 15–16 years, and adults). These languages contrast in the variety of structures available to promote a patient and to downgrade an agent in event encoding. The results show significant effects of Language and Age. When a language has productive alternative rhetorical options for the two functions, it relies less on passive constructions. Across all five languages, passives increase with Age. However, even our youngest subjects show a language-specific rhetorical bias.
This paper examines how choice of subject NP types and structures changes in the development of text construction, and the extent of variation in the developmental patterns which are produced in speech and in writing. The population for this study consisted of 80 participants — 40 grade-school children and 40 university-level adults — with 20 participants in each of four languages: Dutch, Hebrew, English, and Spanish. The database for each language-specific analysis consisted of 40 grade-school texts and 40 adult texts. In each group, half were spoken texts and half written, half were narratives and half expository texts: altogether 320 texts. All subject NP slots in each text were counted and classified by category of realization (zero, pronoun, or lexical), by pronoun type (personal vs. impersonal), and by lexical complexity (terminal NPs governing a single lexical noun vs. non-terminal NPs governing more than one lexical noun). In general, the written expositions of adults are the preferred site for lexical subjects and for non-terminal subjects. Among both children and adults, narratives contain more personal subject pronouns, and expository texts contain more impersonal pronouns. Several cross-linguistic differences emerged (mainly between Spanish and the other three languages), reflecting differences in the syntactic, inflectional, and pronominal patternings of the target languages.
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