Verbal structure and content in written discourse

Abstract

This paper forms a bridge between the article on noun phrase patterning by Ravid et al. 2002 and that on passive voice constructions by Jisa et al. 2002. The study reports on a cross-linguistic, developmental study of verbal structures and verb types used in two genres of written discourse: personal narratives and expository texts. The study is aimed at (a) establishing the profile of linguistic features that characterize and differentiate these two genres; (b) identifying the developmental changes beyond middle childhood that lead to the proficient use of a full repertoire of verbal structures in the construction of both types of text; and (c) providing fresh empirical evidence for cross-linguistic similarities and differences in the linguistic devices used for Genre differentiation. The paper begins to address these issues by considering quantitative aspects of Genre differentiation in four age-groups (grade-school children, junior high school, high school, and adults) and in five languages (Dutch, French, Hebrew, Icelandic, and Spanish). We expected narratives and expository texts to be characterized by contrasting distribution of the categories that we analysed — verb tense, aspect, mood, voice, and person — across the age-groups and languages under study. To test this prediction, all verbs in our sample were analysed using common coding procedures in all five languages, followed by a statistical analysis of the frequency distribution of each coded category (as our dependent variables) across Age and Genre in each of the languages.

Temporal reference marking in narrative and expository text written by deaf children and adults: A bimodal bilingual perspective

“…Expository texts are mostly written in the (timeless) present tense. These findings correspond to those of Ragnarsdóttir et al (2002), who compared the form and content of verb phrases in narrative and expository texts written by hearing children and adults in five languages. Moreover, our data showed that typically developing hearing individuals at all age levels had no difficulties with temporal reference marking.…”

“…Moreover, Group interacted with Age ( F (4,128) = 3.19, p < .05, η 2 p = .09) and with Tense ( F (4,156) = 4.82 p < .01, η 2 p = .07). As can be seen in Table 3, all nine groups of writers clearly anchor their expository texts in the present tense (as also observed in a cross-linguistic study on hearing writers who wrote expository texts in one of five different languages; Ragnarsdóttir et al, 2002). At a more detailed level, however, the pattern in the 11–12-year-old proficient signers is somewhat different.…”

“…The procedures for eliciting narrative and expository texts were similar to those used in a large-scale international research program on later language development in different contexts and in (seven) different languages (e.g., Berman & Verhoeven, 2002; Ragnarsdóttir, Aparici, Cahana-Amitay, van Hell & Vigué, 2002; Ravid, van Hell, Rosada & Zamora, 2002; Reilly, Jisa, Baruch & Berman, 2002; van Hell, Verhoeven, Tak & van Oosterhout, 2005). Participants first viewed a 3-minute video clip without words that showed fragments with teenagers involved in different social, moral and physical conflicts.…”

“…Consequently, the ordering of descriptions in expository texts does not follow the temporal sequencing of events but is dictated by a problem that needs to be addressed. Personal experience narratives are predominantly anchored in the past, and expository texts are typically anchored in the present (see e.g., Ragnarsdóttir, Aparici, Cahana-Amitay, van Hell & Vigué, 2002). Because narratives typically have the marked past tense as the default tense, we expect differences in grammatical markers of temporal reference between proficient signers and low-proficiency signers, and hearing writers to be more pronounced in narratives than in expository texts.…”

Methodological Issues in Literacy Research Across Languages: Evidence From Alphabetic Orthographies

“…This is the case of argument structure that differs across cultures (Uysal, 2012): How arguments are linked in argumentative texts differs and involves different sentence structures or connectors. Similarly, regarding text genres, Ragnarsdóttir, Aparici, Cahana‐Amitay, van Hell, and Viguié (2002) showed that cross‐linguistic similarities and differences about typological structures of verbs used in five languages allowed for differentiating text genres. Therefore, higher order writing skills are also dependent, presumably to a lesser extent than lexical and syntactic proficiencies, on the linguistic contexts, such as information structure and the inherent lexical properties of arguments (Duguine, Huidobro, & Madariaga, 2010; Witzlack‐Makarevich & Seržant, 2018).…”