Description - Relating Events in Narrative by Ruth A. Berman
This volume represents the culmination of an extensive research project that studies the development of linguistic form/function relations in narrative discourse. It is unique in the extent of data which it analyzes - more than 250 texts from children and adults speaking five different languages - and in its crosslinguistic, typological focus. It addresses the issue of how the structural properties and rhetorical preferences of different native languages - English German, Spanish, Hebrew and Turkish - impinge on narrative abilities across different phases of development. The work of Berman and Slobin and their colleagues provides insight into the interplay between shared, possibly universal, patterns in the developing ability to create well-constructed, globally organized narratives among preschoolers from three years of age compared with school children and adults, contrasted against the impact of typological and rhetorical features in particular native languages on how speakers express these abilities in the processs of "relating events in narrative".
This volume also makes a contribution to the field of language acquisition and development by providing detailed analyses of how linguistic forms come to be used in the service of narrative functions such as the expression of temporal relations of simultaneity and retrospection, perspective-taking on events, and textual connectivity. To present this information, the authors prepared in-depth analyses of a wide range of linguistic systems, including tense-aspects marking, passive and middle voice, locative and directional predications, connectivity markers, null subjects, and relative clause constructions. This book focuses on development in the use of these early forms in extended discourse - beyond the initial phase of early language development. The book offers a pioneering approach to the interactions between form and function in the development and use of language, from a typological linguistic perspective. The study is based on a large crosslinguistic corpus of narratives, elicited from preschool, school-age and adult subjects. All of the narratives were elicited by the same picture storybook, "Frog, Where Are You?", by Mercer Mayer.
(An appendix lists related studies using the same storybook in 50 languages). The findings illuminate both universal and language-specific patterns of development, providing insights into questions of language and thought.
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