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SYNTACTIC AND DISCURSIVE DIEEERENCES'
BETWEEN CASUAL ORAL AND FORMAL ORAL STYLES
IN THE NARRATIVES 0F THIRD AND SIXTH GRADERs’
presented by
MARILYN J. WILSON
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‘
SYNTACTIC AND DISCURSIVE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN
CASUAL ORAL AND FORMAL ORAL STYLES IN THE
NARRATIVES OF THIRD AND SIXTH GRADERS
By
Marilyn J. Wilson
A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of English
1980
ABSTRACT
SYNTACTIC AND DISCURSIVE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN
CASUAL ORAL AND FORMAL ORAL STYLES IN THE
"NARRATIVES OF THIRD AND SIXTH GRADERS
By
Marilyn J. Wilson
Questions have recently been raised not only about the
syntactic development of children's language but also about children's
stylistic development in the use of language and the development of
their ability to handle narrative discourse. This study investigates
the syntactic and discursive structures of third graders' and sixth
graders' informal oral narratives and the shifts that are made in
syntactic and discursive structures from casual to more formal oral
narratives.
Fifteen third graders and fifteen sixth graders were asked
to tell a fairy tale, either "Snow White" or "Cinderella," on two
separate occasions. The first was ostensibly a practice session for
the second but covertly recorded; the second was openly recorded with
the promise of its being written down as a story for other children
to read. T-Units were used to analyze the syntactic structures, and
the theories of narrative structure of Labov and of Stein and Glenn
were used in the analysis of narrative discourse.
Marilyn J. Wilson
Results show that syntactic complexity for both grades
increases from casual to formal styles in the following variables:
length of T-Units and clauses, ratio of subordinate clauses to
T-Units, numbers of non-clause modifiers of nouns, and numbers of
passives and inversions. The formal style also produces fewer
initial coordinating conjunctions and more formal diction and syntax.
At the same time, the increases in syntactic complexity are not as
great as those found in Hunt's and O'Donnell's data on written
language, suggesting that formal oral language is not comparable to
written language; rather they are perhaps on a continuum, ranging
from informal oral to formal oral to written. Differences in syn-
tactic structures between grade levels are not as substantial as
differences between styles.
Both third and sixth graders exhibit an awareness of the
demands of formal narrative structure and of the need to include
details and sequencing signals for the listener. Formal styles
appears to demand an increase in motivation, greater coherence,
and greater development of characterization.
Sixth graders appear to have greater control of narrative
structure than third graders in their inclusion of significant epi-
sodes and scenes, greater motivation, clearer delineation of the
relationships between episodes, and greater control of coherence
and sequencing.
Evaluated narrative, in Labov's sense, is produced by both
third and sixth graders to a greater degree in the formal style than
in the informal. Such devices as recording the state of mind of the
Marilyn J. Wilson
characters, including details, using dialogue, and using more eval-
uation syntax make the formal narratives more reportable. The use
of evaluative devices, particularly evaluative syntax, increases for
the sixth graders. While sixth graders are not all accomplished
story tellers, they do appear to surpass the third graders substan-
tially in their ability to make the narratives memorable. It appears
that sixth graders have a more developed sense of audience and an
understanding of audience needs.
The three major hypotheses (l) that children as young as
eight already control stylistic variations, (2) that formal style
will elicit more complex syntax and greater control of narrative
discourse, and (3) that sixth graders would demonstrate greater
control in these respects were borne out by the data. The major
difference in control is in narrative structure, where sixth
graders appear to surpass the third graders in substantial ways,
rather than in syntactic complexity.
To my son and to my parents,
for their cooperation and their kindnesses,
and to Stuart, whose understanding, inspiration,
encouragement, and above all, good humor
made this all possible.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Acknowledgments are due many people for making this project
a reality. Foremost is James Stalker, my dissertation director, who
gave generously of this time and his expert advice about this proj-
ect. I am grateful for his guidance and support. Thanks are also
due Nancy Ainsworth, Stephen Judy, and Jay Ludwig, the other members
of my doctoral committee, who offered encouragement, support, and
invaluable suggestions. Special thanks are due Jim Kalmbach for his
advice and aid in the statistical analysis of my data.
Finally, my gratitude is extended to the fifteen third
graders and fifteen sixth graders at Lyons Elementary School in
Lansing--and to their teachers--for giving generously of their time
and for making the data collection such a delightful experience.
Their cooperation and interest made this project possible.
LIST OF
LIST OF
Chapter
I.
II.
III.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLES
FIGURES
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Introduction . .
Developmental Trends in Language Learning:
Syntactic Complexity. . . . .
Traditional Studies .
Transformational- Generative Studies .
Developmental Trends in Language Learning:
Stylistic Variation . . . . .
The Variables of Style . . .
Acquisition of Stylistic Control .
Narrative Structure .
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY .
Thesis . .
Population and Sample
Procedure .
Method of Analysis
SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS
T- Unit Analysis
Non- Clause Modifiers of Nouns :
Types of Subordinate Clauses
Distribution of Clauses Among Multi— Clause T- Units :
Coordination of T- Units .
Other Syntactic Complexities
Lexical Selection .
Conclusions .
iv
Page
vi
vii
Chapter
IV.
VI.
APPENDIX
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE: STORY
Narrative Structure: A schema
Story Schema: Orientation and Episode System.
Orientation . .
Episode System . .
Episode System: Cinderella
Episode System: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Analysis of Stories: Orientations
Analysis of Stories: Episode System
Episodes . . . . . .
Motivation
Characterization
Additional Details . . . . .
Relationship Between Episodes. Cinderella
Relationship Between Episodes. Snow White
Discussion of Relationships Between Episodes .
Coherence in Episodes . . . . . .
Discussion of Results
NARRATIVE: DISCURSIVE STRUCTURE .
Discursive Structure: A Schema
Abstract in Discursive Structure .
Coda in Discursive Structure
Evaluation in Discursive Structure
Evaluation and Syntax
Intensifiers
Comparators
Correlatives
Explicatives .
Evaluation in Vicarious Narrative
Discussion of Results
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
Implications
BIBLIOGRAPHY
164
I71
I78
185
205
Table
0101-500
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
LIST OF TABLES
T-Unit Analysis: Average Number of Words per Sample,
Words per T-Unit, Words per Clause, and Clauses
per T-Unit . . . . . . . . . .
Average Number of Words per T-Unit, Words per Clause,
and Clauses per T-Unit . .
Ratio of Non-Clause Modifiers of Nouns per T-Unit
Ratio of Subordinate Clause Types per T-Unit
Distribution of Clauses Among Multi-Clause T-Units
Rate of Occurrence of Initial Coordinating Conjunc-
tions per 100 T-Units . . . . . .
O'Donnell's Study: Rate of Occurrence of Initial
Coordinating Connunctions per 100 T-Units
Ratio of Passives and Inversions per lOO T-Units .
Number of Students Including Key Scenes--Cinderella .
Number of Students Including Key Scenes--Snow White .
Types of Introducers
Percentage of Types of Codas
Ratio of Instances of Quoted Dialogue per lOO T- Units
for "Cinderella" and "Snow White" .
Frequency of Comparatives, Correlatives, and Expli-
catives for lOO T-Units . . . . .
vi
Page
46
49
55
57
61
65
66
68
98
101
140
142
147
150
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure Page
1. Distribution of Clauses Among Multi-Clause T-Units,
Hunt and Wilson . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
2. Summary of Grammatical Rules, Stein and Glenn . . . 80
3. Structure of a Simple Episode, Stein and Glenn . . 81
vii
Once upon a time . . .
viii
CHAPTER I
REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE
Introduction
Researchers in language acquisition and language production
have long been interested in developmental trends in language learn-
ing and in the definition and description of syntactic maturity:
what can one expect to find in the language performance of older
children in terms of syntactic complexity and syntactic appropriate-
ness that one would not expect to find in the language of younger
children? 'The notion that virtually all of language has been learned
by the child by the age of five or six has been discredited by the
research of Paula Menyuk and Carol Chomsky among others,on syntactic
development beyond the age of six. Their research indicates that
children do not acquire productive control of certain transformations
until after that age.
Recently linguists have been looking with increasing interest
at stylistic variation in language performance and at the ages at
which speakers gain control in exercising stylistic choices. Of
particular interest is the role that social constraints relative to
audience, participants, and topics play in the stylistic choices a
language user makes. William Labov's seminal work in sociolinguistics
(l97l) leads him to state:
. . a great deal of language learning takes place rela-
tively late in life [after the prime language-learning time
of 0-6 years], especially the knowledge of the significant
choices within the set of possibilities open to native
speakers. . . . These differences in language convey a great
deal of information: not cognitive information of the type
usually considered most important--but rather a wide variety
of noncognitive information on the speakers, the situations,
the topics, the immediate attitudes, and underlying values
which are governed by social interaction.1
Speakers acquire a complex verbal repertoire and gain new linguistic
competence as they enter into new social situations.
While most of the research and literature on stylistic vari-
ation is concerned with the language performance of adolescents and
adults, this study investigates the language capability of elementary
school-age children, third graders and sixth graders specifically,
particularly their ability to shift from a casual style of oral
narrative discourse to a more formal style, given social situations
which require such a shift to be made. My thesis is that stylistic
variations in oral language--those more or less conscious choices in
syntax, vocabulary, and narrative structure--are coming under the
child's control as early as the third grade, with increasing control
occurring for sixth graders. At the same time, this study describes
the differences between syntactic complexity in a formal oral style
and in a formal written style. The children, at one stage, were
instructed to produce a story "to be written down." (See Chapter II
for details on methodology.) Thus, while no data were gathered
directly on the written style of the students in this study, the
design of the study does allow some interesting comparisons to be
made between that data on the fbrmal oral style gathered from my
students and the data on the written style gathered by researchers
like O'Donnell, Griffin, and Norris (1967) in their study of oral
and written language.
Any research on stylistic variation must necessarily consider
the research done on developmental trends in language learning, spe-
cifically on language maturity and syntactic complexity at the ages
being studied. Four questions need to be explored. First, what does
the research reveal about the language production ability of the ages
being studied? Second, how has syntactic maturity or complexity been
defined in terms of syntactic control, and what differences can one
expect to find between children's syntax at various grade levels?
Third, what does the research on stylistic variation contribute to
our knowledge of the ages at which children begin acquiring control
of a verbal repertoire of styles? Fourth, what does the research
contribute to our understanding of the capabilities of children at
various grade levels for handling narrative structure? A review of
the major research and literature on these topics follows.
Developmental Trends in Language
Learning: Syntactic Complexity
Traditional Studies
The studies of language performance of children from 1930
to 1960, growing out of the traditional theory of grammar, were
primarily concerned with sentence length, kinds of subordinate
clauses, relative frequencies of parts of speech, a description of
errors in morphology and syntax, and tabulation of sentence types
such as simple, compound, and complex.2 Throughout these early
studies, researchers struggled with the definition of sentence and
with the inadequacy of sentence length as a measure of syntactic
complexity. Both Davis (1937) and Templin (l957) set up rules for
sentence division in speech, partly based on prosodic features that
would now be labeled "terminal junctures," and McCarthy (l930)
introduced designations such as "simple sentence with phrase" and
"elaborated sentence" as an attempt to disambiguate the term.
Much of the research in the late fifties and early sixties
was based on structural linguistics, with the two major research
projects on children's language being conducted by Strickland (l962)
and Loban (1963). Strickland based her investigation on the "phono-
logical units" obtained from the oral language of children, grades
one through six. Her phonological unit, or sentence, was defined as
"a unit of speech ending with a distinct falling intonation which
signals a terminal point."3 Although her definition corrected some
of the problems of sentence definition, the task of defining syn-
tactic maturity still existed. Sentence length by itself, without
regard for complexities within the sentence, was an inaccurate
measure of syntactic maturity because embedded sentences can be used
to increase syntactic complexity. A conjoined sentence can instead
be embedded, with the result being a shorter but more complex sen-
tence. "The man was standing on the corner and he was selling
balloons" becomes "The man standing on the corner was selling
balloons." Strickland herself concluded that the length of the
phonological unit was not a very satisfactory measure of the
maturity or the complexity of language.4
Despite the problems inherent in sentence definition,
Stickland's study provided an interesting perspective on the language
of children at the elementary level. She analyzed her data according
to the syntactic structure of sentences, frequency of syntactic pat-
terns, and amount and kinds of subordination. Some of her conclu-
sions, with implications for the present study, are listed below:
l. Children at all grade levels used a wide variety of
sentence patterns, although five or six patterns were
favorites at all grade levels.
2. The lengths of the phonological units used by these
children varied more within a grade than from grade
to grade; therefore length of phonological unit
proved to be an unsatisfactory measure of language
maturity.
3. Children at all grade levels could expand and elabo-
rate their sentences through the use of movables and
subordination.5
Strickland concluded that, in general, a wide range of language
patterns is used by children at all grade levels and that children
at an early age acquire the basic structures of language; these
findings are germane to the present study.
In 1952 Walter Loban initiated a longitudinal study of
children's oral language abilities that followed the same subjects
from kindergarten through high school. Dissatisfied with the
phonological unit as the basis for segmenting his subjects' language,
he used instead the "communication unit"--a grammatical, independent
clause with any of its modifiers.6 He regarded two coordinated inde-
pendent clauses as two communication units. A number of significant
developmental patterns appeared in the language samples he studied:
1. In each succeeding year of measurement, the number of
words in communication units increased, on an average.
2. Flexibility within pattern rather than pattern itself
seemed to be a measure of effectiveness and control of
language: the high group in language ability employed
a more extensive repertoire of adverbial clauses and
showed a greater capacity for fitting movables within
movables.
3. The subjects as a whole used adverbial and nominal
clauses much more frequently than adjectival clauses,
and all groups showed an increasing use of subordina-
tion as their chronological age increased.
Other researchers of the sixties, Strang and Hocker (1965), for
example, found evidence substantiating Loban's and Strickland's
claim that flexibility within structural patterns, not sentence
length, is indicative of linguistic sophistication.8
Transformational-Generative Studies
Language acquisition studies based on transformational-
generative theory, for the most part, corroborated the findings
of the earlier studies of the developmental patterns of language
acquisition and the relative degree of linguistic sophistication
demonstrated by five- and six-year-olds. These studies signifi-
cantly superceded previous research, however, by attempting to
investigate language competence--the internalized knowledge of
language—-as well as language performance--the language actually
produced--and by using more sophisticated methodology for the
analysis of sentence structure.
Paula Menyuk (1963), in an analysis of the language of
children from two to seven, studied the base structures acquired
by her subjects and the kinds of transformations performed on them.
She found a developmental order in the acquisition of certain trans-
formations; the passive and nominalization, for example, were formed
9 Carol Chomsky (1969)
more often by older than by younger children.
discovered that at the levels of both competence and performance,
certain syntactic structures in which the deep structure relation-
ships are not explicitly signalled in the surface structure (such as
the underlying structures of "John is easy to see," "John promised
Bill to go," and “John asked Bill what to do") are acquired by many
children well after the age of five, and by some children not until
the age of nine or ten.10
Of most significance to the present study are the studies
done by Kellogg Hunt (1965) and by O'Donnell, Griffin and Norris
(1967). Hunt's study, Grammatical Structures Written at Three Grade
Lgyglg, deals with the written language of fourth, eighth, and
twelfth grade students. His study of written language is important
to the present research especially for two reasons: (1) Hunt inves-
tigated writing; although my study is on oral language, it was one
of my original hypotheses that the formal style produced by my
students would share certain features of a writing style; and (2)
Hunt, in his study, produced an objective, quantitative measure for
syntactic analysis that he called a minimal terminable unit. Like
Loban, he was dissatisfied with sentence length as a measure of
complexity because sentences of younger children tend to be longer
than those of older children, a fact accounted for by young
children's overuse of the coordinate "and" between main clauses.
Hunt's "T-Unit" consists of one main clause plus any subordinate
clauses or phrases attached to or embedded in the main clause.
The purpose of Hunt's study was to discover the developmental
trends in the frequency of various grammatical structures written by
students in the three grades. Hunt collected writing samples on a
variety of subjects from each student in the study and analyzed
samples of a thousand words from each. The subject matter was what-
ever the student normally wrote about in school. All writing was
done under the supervision of the teachers, with no changes made in
1] Hunt defined "maturity" in language
«12
the writing of the student.
use as "the observed characteristics of writers in an older grade.
Sentence maturity for Hunt has nothing to do with whether older stu-
dents write better in any general stylistic sense. Rather it refers
to the differences between their syntactic structures and those of
younger students as directly correlated to an increase in their
chronological ages. Sentence maturity, then, for Hunt, is really
sentence complexity and as such has nothing to do with content,
appropriateness of syntax for situation, etc. In their article,
"Syntactic Maturity and Syntactic Appropriateness in Teaching
Writing," Malmstrom and Weaver (1976) caution against incorrectly
assuming a correlation between syntactic complexity and "good"
writing: ". . . syntactically mature sentences are not always
stylistically appropriate sentences. Neither are syntactically
mature sentences necessarily syntactically clear; that is, the
syntax of a syntactically mature sentence may be difficult to
unravel."13
Hunt's results show that the best index of syntactic com-
plexity is T-Unit length, the second best is clause length, and the
third best is clauses per T-Unit, or subordinate clause index. As
children get older, their T-Units get progressively longer, and
they write more clauses per T—Unit. Hunt discovered the increase
in the use of adjective clauses to be of particular significance.
His investigation of subordinate clauses reveals that adjective
clauses, rather than noun or adverb clauses, are the ones used
more often by older students.14
In equal numbers of words, eighth
graders used one and a half times as many adjective clauses as
fOurth graders, and twelfth graders used more than twice as many
as fourth graders. The number of adjective clauses per T—Unit for
grades 4, 8, and 12 was .45, .090, and .16, respectively--an almost
fourfold increase.15
The increased length of T-Units is partially explained by
increases in the use of dependent clauses, but Hunt also discovered
that significant increases occurred in the lengths of the clauses
themselves. Even T-Units containing no subordinate clauses increased
in length at about the same rate as did multi-clause T-Units. He
hypothesized that the lengthening of T-Units resulted in part from
an increase in the number of sub-clausal sentence-combining trans-
formations embedded in them, and this was borne out by his data.
The major lengthening of clauses occurs as an expansion of the
nominals used as subjects, objects of verbs, objects of preposi-
tions, etc. For example, eighth graders, as compared with fourth
graders, used more than twice as many nominals per clause. "One
10
gets the impression," states Hunt, "that the younger students tend
to use short clauses to express these meanings, whereas older
students tend to reduce such clauses to mere modifiers which are
consolidated with the same noun in another clause, thus achieving
greater length."16
In addition to the expansion of nominals, the nominalization
of clauses--converting a clause to a nonclause nominal--also helps to
account for the increase in lengthening of clauses.
Two general conclusions arrived at by Hunt, pertinent to the
present study, are (1) that almost all the syntactic structures iden-
tified were used by the youngest writers, and (2) that many of these
structures, nevertheless, were used with significantly greater
frequency by the older students, particularly those produced by
sentence-combining and deletion transformations, reducing sentences
to words and phrases, and embedding them within other clauses.
In 1967 O'Donnell, Griffin, and Norris researched the
oral and written language of children in grades 3, 5, and 7. The
language samples consisted of children's oral and written responses
to two films--animated cartoons of two of Aesop's fables--and each
was shown without sound so that the language of the film would not
influence the language of the children. Each child was asked to
tell the story of the cartoon privately to an interviewer, and the
oral responses were taped. The students were then asked to write
the story of the film. Using the T-Unit as a measure of syntactic
complexity, the researchers analyzed the oral and written samples
and then compared the results of the two styles. Their results,
11
published in Syntax of Kindergarten and Elementary School Children:
A Transformational Analysis (1967), include the following:
1.. In both speech and writing, the total length of responses
increased with every advance in grade level.
2. At every grade the average length of the T-Unit increased
both in speech and writing, as did the number of clauses
per T-Unit.
3. The use of sentence-combining transformations increased
with age in both modes of expression, particularly the
use of adverbial constructions.
4. Kindergarten children used relative clauses with greater
frequency than children at any later grade level, a sharp
contrast to Hunt's results showing that an increase in
the use of such clauses indicates syntactic maturity.17
Most of Hunt's and O'Donnell's conclusions are not surprising, given
past research on developmental patterns in learning language. The
general conclusions we arrive at from a composite view of the
research cited are that although the basic sentence patterns are
acquired by children at an early age, the use of adverbial phrases
and clauses, in particular, and other sentence-combining transfor-
mations, in general, increased with age; the most developmental
variety of syntactic structure was found within the sentence or
clause, both in the kinds of structures used within a clause and
in the frequency with which certain structures appeared in
children's speech; and the length of T-Units as well as the length
of the clauses increased with the chronological maturity of the
child.
12
Developmental Trends in Language
Learning: Stylistic Variation
The Variables of Style
Variation in language has generally been described in terms
of dialect variation by researchers interested in regional, social,
and ethnic language variations. The major purpose of such studies
has been to write the grammars of the various dialects. But any
purely linguistic description of the rule system of a language or
a dialect of that language is necessarily limited because of the
distinction that is usually made between linguistic and non-
linguistic data. Researchers in sociolinguistics have given
language description a broader base to account for the fact that
speech variation is a function of networks of social relationships.
Gumperz (1972) sees the line between social and linguistic cate-
gories obliterated. He comments:
Communication is not governed by fixed social rules; it is
a two-step process in which the speaker first takes in
stimuli from the outside environment, evaluating and select-
ing from among them in the light of his own cultural back-
ground, personal history, and what he knows about his inter-
locutors. He then decides on the norms that apply to the
situation at hand. These norms determine the speaker's
selection from among the communicative options available
for encoding his intent.‘8
The primary concern of this study is the stylistic varia-
tions existing between the language patterns used in two different
situational contexts, i.e., where the speakers make linguistic
decisions, either consciously or subconsciously, on the basis of
the situation. As such, the study becomes a sociolinguistic one.
13
Style is more than a matter of statistical frequency of
elements or deviations from a norm. Dell Hymes (1972) says that
styles also depend on qualitative judgments of appropriateness and
"must often be described in terms of selections that apply globally
"19 As a framework for styles he discusses speech
to a discourse.
events and speech acts, the former being defined as "activities,
or aspects of activities, that are directly governed by rules or
20 and a speech act as the minimal
norms for the use of speech,"
term of a speech event. As such, a speech event may consist of a
single speech act, but it will often consist of several. A party
is a speech situation, a conversation during the party is a speech
event, and a joke within a conversation is a speech act.
Hymes offers a list of the components of speech acts
and events which affect the style, the sociolinguistic variables
affecting speakers' linguistic choices. The major components rele-
vant to my study are the message, content, or topic; the setting
or situation dictating the register; the participants, including
speaker and listener; the goals and purposes; the channel or medium
of transmission of speech, i.e., oral or written; and the genre
or mode.21
The classic work on style involving participants and
situations is Martin Joos' The Five Clocks (1961), in which he
designates five styles of language, either oral or written, that
are dictated primarily by situation, participants, and purposes.
The range of styles includes the intimate, which excludes public
information and communicates the person and the situation rather
14
than providing information; the casual, also excluding public
information, but which is addressed to friends and acquaintances
and which makes use of ellipsis and slang; the consultative, used
for conducting daily business, and which makes use of background
information, with the listener participating continuously; the
jnrmal, which includes non-participation of the listener(s) and
is designed to inform; and frgzen, the style of print and declama-
tion.22
Susan Ervin-Tripp (1972) defines style as the term normally
used to refer to the co-occurrent predictable changes at various
levels of linguistic structure within one language. She describes
Joos' analysis of style as dealing with the vertical properties of
such shifts, whereby a stylistic shift made at one level of struc-
ture, such as the syntactic, will also dictate a shift at another
level, such as the phonological.23 William Labov's study of the
dialects of New York City (1976) represents a similar kind of
analysis, in which stylistic variations in different social strata
are studied. Labov contrasted grammatical, lexical, and phono-
logical elements used by subjects in a wide range of socio-economic
classes, and established four categories of style: casual speech,
24 Casual speech was
careful speech, reading style, and word lists.
elicited by the question, "Have you ever been in danger or near
death?" and careful speech by the interview itself, so that the
two styles represent the speech patterns largely determined by the
variables of different topics, situations, and goals. Labov found
in his interview that when changes occurred in a speech episode
15
from a careful to a casual style, such shifts affected three levels
of structure: the phonology, the syntax, and the lexicon.
The studies of Joos, Labov, and Ervin-Tripp all illustrate
the impact of the "qualitative judgments of appropriateness" that
Hymes refers to in language use. As the topic, the situation, the
participants, the goals change, so does the style of the language
used. The communicative option the speaker selects is controlled
by all of these variables.
Acquisition of Stylistic Control
Research on stylistic variation presents numerous examples
of style shifts in the language of adult speakers, as cited.
Research on the stylistic variations in the language of children
is not so abundant, although more recently there has been growing
interest in this kind of investigation. It is a fairly well-
established fact that all adult speakers of English, regardless of
native dialect, have control over a range of styles, but it is less
certain the degree to which children still in the process of acquir-
ing a full adult grammar of English control more than one style.25
DeStefano's study of the English vernacular spoken by black
ghetto children (1974) suggests that in formal educational situations
these children, as early as in the first grade, used more standard
English forms than they are commonly believed by teachers to control.
Her study consisted of repetition tasks for black ghetto children,
grades one,three, and five, whose native dialect was Black English
Vernacular. The sentences contained various forms from a "Language
16
Instruction Register" (her term for the style of classroom instruc-
tion); all of these forms have semantic equivalents in the black
vernacular registers the students already controlled. Two-thirds of
all the responses of the black children made use of the forms in the
Language Instruction Register, with more than 50 percent of the first
graders' responses, more than 60 percent of the third graders'
responses, and more than 70 percent of the fifth graders' responses
26
being in the formal register. Her conclusion is that children do
acquire control of registers fairly early and learn to make socially
appropriate language responses.
As early as 1965 Hocker reported a study of the spontaneous
oral language of first graders, showing that stylistic variation
exists among first graders in both language patterns and sentence
length, depending on the situation such as parties, trips, school
27
or home. Rudolph Troike (1976) provides anecdotal evidence of
both receptive and productive bidialectalism among young children.
He illustrates the social perceptiveness of young children with the
following anecdote:
As is well known, there are two ways in American English of
pronouncing the word creek: in northern dialects it is
pronounced to rhyme with pick (even by educated speakers),
while elsewhere it rhymes with peek. An acquaintance of
the writer happens to be a "crick' speaker, while his wife
is a “creek" speaker. Several years ago his son, who was
then five, said something to his father about the "creek"
behind their home, and was promptly reproved by his four-
year-old sister with "Don't you know that you're supposed
to say 'crick' to Daddy and 'creek' to Mommy?"28
Julie Jensen's study, "A Comparative Investigation of the
Casual and Careful Oral Language Styles of Average and Superior
17
Fifth Grade Boys and Girls" (1973), describes the differences
between two oral styles, with the variables again being the setting
or situation and the participants. She defines careful speech style
as that associated with a mental set in which particular attention
is paid to one's manner of speaking, and casual speech as that which
29 She elicited casual speech
is informal, spontaneous, and relaxed.
by having the children, in pairs, discuss the topic of selection of
animals for a zoo, with no interviewer present and a running tape
recorder concealed. After the casual speech period, the interviewer
entered the room, dismissed one of the children, and conducted an
interview on the same subject with the remaining child, thereby
obtaining careful speech samples. Given the evidence of the studies
previously cited in which different speech styles are controlled by
much younger children, it is not surprising that Jensen reported
significant differences between casual and careful speech in her
study of fifth graders. In terms of grammatical control she found
significant differences between the two styles, the careful style
demonstrating substantial increases in the following areas: length
of communication units (or T-Units); length of clauses; greater
subordination and structural complexity. Variety of syntactic
patterns remained the same from casual to careful.30
All of the studies of stylistic language variation of
children cited to date have dealt with the different styles or
registers produced by changes in either the situation or the par-
ticipants. Other variables affecting styles of language production
are the channel, whether oral or written; content or topic; and
18
genre or mode. With reference to the channel of the discourse,
Strickland, Loban, and Menyuk all based their research on oral
language; Hunt's study was based on the writing samples of his
subjects. But the study of O'Donnell, et al. concerned itself
with both forms of discourse, comparing the oral language of the
subjects with their written language, keeping the purpose, the
participants, the topic, and the situation constant. The following
differences found in the O'Donnell study between the two forms or
channels of expression are most relevant to my study:
1. Oral compositions were longer than written compositions
at every grade level.
2. Word length of T-Units was significantly greater in oral
than in written expression in grade 3; it was greater in
writing than in speech in grades 5 and 7, though not
significantly so.
3. The average number of sentence-combining transformations
per T-Unit was significantly greater in writing than in
speech in grades 5 and 7, and nonsignificantly greater
in speech than in writing in grade 3.
4. Initial coordinating conjunctions appeared in T—Units
in each of the grades about three times as often in
speech as in writing.3
Another stylistic variable is subject matter, content, or
topic: does the topic affect the style, and to what extent? Does
one kind of topic elicit greater syntactic complexity than another
kind of topic might? Little research has been done on this.
Because Hunt's study and O'Donnell's study each elicited different
kinds of writing--Hunt examining a thousand words of free writing
from students' normal writing assignments in school and O'Donnell
having subjects view a film and tell the story of the film--their
19
studies cannot provide data concerning these questions. But a
later study by Hunt (1970) demonstrated that syntactic complexity
is, to some extent, independent of subject matter. In his experi-
ment, writers of varying ages and maturity levels were asked to
perform the same writing task, each being given a set of simple
sentences to combine, utilizing all of the information they con-
tained. Even when the older writers added no more information,
they still wrote more words per T-Unit and more words per clause,
32 While this research
displaying greater syntactic complexity.
indicates that sentence complexity is, to some extent, independent
of subject matter, it does not prove that subject matter has n9
effect on syntactic complexity.
Still another variable is the genre or mode of discourse:
narrative, expository, conversational, poetic, oratorial, etc.
Mike Pope's study, "The Syntax of Fourth Graders' Narrative and
Explanatory Speech " (1974), points to some significant differ-
ences between these two modes of discourse. He obtained the nar-
rative speech by showing a short film and asking the subjects to
retell the story of the film, and the explanatory speech by showing
a short documentary film and having the subjects provide an explana-
tion of the film. Using Hunt's measure of syntactic complexity, he
found that explanatory speech had longer T-Units, a higher subordi-
nate clause index, and more sentence-combining transformations.33
Adjective clauses and modifiers were used with greater frequency in
this mode, as were noun clauses, adverbial clauses of time, cause,
and condition, and comparative phrases. The only transformation
20
more common in narrative was the coordinate predicate. Pope com-
pared his results on syntactic complexity with those of O'Donnell.
The syntactic complexity of his fourth graders' narrative speech
was comparable to that of the first and third graders' narrative
speech in O'Donnell's study, while the syntactic complexity in his
fourth graders' explanatory speech was comparable to O'Donnell's
fifth and seventh graders' narrative speech. This comparison
appears to give added support to Pope's assumptions about the
syntactic difference in the two modes.
Narrative Structure
The third question that this study is investigating is
the degree to which children have control of narrative discourse,
both in terms of stylistic variation and of narrative structure.
The narratives produced by the third and sixth graders in my study
were casual and formal versions of two fairy tales: "Cinderella“
and "Snow White."
Discourse analysis is a relatively new field of study,
since most linguistic analysis deals with the sentence or smaller
units rather than with linguistic units that go beyond sentence
boundaries. The research and analysis done to date can be clas-
sified in four major categories: (1) a textual analysis of simple
stories and fairy tales with respect to their underlying structure
and the relationship existing between the elements within that
structure, resulting in a generalized "story schema";34 (2) the
effects of such generalized schemata on the recall of narrative by
21
subjects of various ages, in psychological studies; (3) analysis
of the content of original stories that children tell, with emphasis
on the kinds of character and plot development produced at various
ages; and (4) the extension of textual analysis to more sophisticated
fiction and the resulting schemata for specific literary texts.
Little research has been done on the control of narrative
structure by children of varying ages. The existing research
includes (1) the psychological studies done on children to determine
their ability to recall stories after having read or heard them for
the first time, such as the research of Mandler and Johnson (1977),
Rumelhart (1975), and Stein and Glenn (1975), a situation consider-
ably different from the task the students were asked to perform in
my study; and (2) William Labov's study (1976) of fight narratives
produced by preadolescent and adolescent blacks of varying ages,
along with Kernan's study (1977), discussed later in this chapter.
My review of the literature on discourse analysis was an attempt to
find a framework that I could adapt to my analysis of the narrative
structures of the fairy tales produced by the students.
Much of the work in the first category--the analysis of
simple stories and fairy tales-~has received its impetus from V. A.
Propp's Morgnology of the Folktale (1968), a detailed analysis of
the composition of Russian folktales. Such analyses are based on
the assumption that myths and fairy tales have very similar and
unusually clear structural characteristics compared to many other
types of prose because of their transmission in the oral tradition.
Mandler and Johnson (1977) state: "An orally transmitted story will
22
survive only if it conforms to an ideal schema in the first place
or has gradually attained such a structure through repeated retell-
35 Even though variation exists in the retelling of the tales,
ings."
the end result is that in each tale a stable organization emerges,
partially as Latman (1975) suggests, because "one of the most stable
images in the world repertoire of fairy tales is based on the con-
flict of two orders--rejection and failure, on the one hand, and
recognition and success on the other."36
Propp's analysis suggests
a binary network of narrative categories that Rumelhart, many years
later in "Notes on a Schema for Stories" (1975), adapts, modifies,
and systematizes in his own creation of a simple story grammar.
Though limited, his grammar does attempt to represent the internal
organization of story material.
The second type of analysis of narrative structure is
designed to study the comprehension of narrative material by sub-
jects of varying ages. It attempts to illustrate hierarchical
levels of complexity in narrative discourse which guide comprehen-
sion processes during encoding and aid retrieval processes during
1.37 Many of these studies, while not directly applicable to
recal
the present investigation, do offer some valuable insights into
narrative structure and provide a basis for useful analysis.
Mandler and Johnson discuss the limitations of Rumelhart's des-
cription of story structure as being too narrow and applicable to
stories with only single or embedded episodes. They make some
adjustments of his original schemata for their own purposes.
Stein and Glenn (1975) similarly use Rumelhart's analysis as the
23
foundation for their own. However, they make significant modifi-
cations in an attempt to overcome the serious limitations that they
find in Rumelhart's schemata; in their view the hierarchical network
of categories is not always binary in nature, and the relationships
between categories are more complex in some cases than Rumelhart's
schemata suggest.
Story grammars like those developed by Rumelhart, Mandler
and Johnson, and Stein and Glenn are much like the phrase structure
constituent grammars of modern linguistics. The underlying structure
of a story can be represented as a tree structure which makes the
constituent structure and the relationships between the constituents
explicit. The events in the story are related both by their place
in the tree structure and by the type of connections, causal or
38
temporal, that exist between them. The following tree structure
(omitting the phrase-structure rules that produce the tree) is an
example of one episode of a story, provided by Stein and Glenn:39
Story
Setting ------ Allow -------- Episode System
Episode
Initiating ------- Initiate ------- Response
Event J,,/“
Response 1 ----- Cause ----- Response 2
Story consists of (1) setting and (2) the episode system. The
setting sets the conditions that allow the episodes to occur. Each
24
episode consists of an initiating event and response(s). These
two categories are connected by the "Initiate" relationship denoting
a causal connection between the initiating event and the response.
But because a story usually has more than one episode, it is neces-
sary to show in different ways the relationships that exist between
episodes. Three basic relationships exist: (1) an AND relationship
that indicates simultaneous activity or temporally overlapping states;
(2) a Ifl§N_relationship indicating temporal order; and (3) a QAU§§_
relationship indicating a direct causal connection between two epi-
sodes. The latter is illustrated by the following partial tree
structure provided by Stein and Glenn:40
Story
Setting ----- Allow ----- Episode System
Episode
Episode 1
CAUSE
Episode 2
This schema was developed, in part, from Stein and Glenn's
attempts to study the structural relationships existing in the stories
told by their subjects during tests of immediate recall. While the
purposes of my study are quite different, the schema nevertheless
offers a rudimentary framework for the analysis of narrative struc-
tures detailed by my students.
25
Such a schema is suggested, although not specifically
delineated, in the studies in the third category of literature on
narrative structure--the studies done on the content of children's
original stories, with major emphasis on analysis of subject, char-
acterization, and plot development. Pitcher and Prelinger (1963)
analyze the content of the spontaneous stories told by children
between the ages of two and five, an interesting though not directly
applicable study for my own analysis of the retellings of fairy
tales. Arthur Applebee (1978) expands their analysis of these
stories and discusses stories told by older children as well. His
purpose is to correlate them to the stages of cognitive development
proposed by Piaget and Vygotsky. What emerges in Applebee's des-
cription of how the child's conceptual development is reflected in
the types of narrative the child produces. He lists the six major
stages of narrative from least to most complex, each representing
a progressively more complex combination of two basic structuring
4] The first general stage,
principles, centering and chaining.
"heaps," is the stage of immediate perception, with few links
between items. The second stage, "sequences," relates to the
child's making use of superficial and arbitrary sequences in time
without any discernible causal link between them. The third stage,
labeled "primitive narrative," is a collection of complementary
events organized around a concrete core. The fourth, the "unfocused
chain," consists of incidents leading directly from one to another
but the attributes linking them continue to shift. The result is
a story that has much of the structure of a narrative but which
26
basically loses its point and direction. The fifth, the "focused
chain," occurs when children's stories containing the processes of
chaining and centering occur within one narrative. Typically the
center is a main character who goes through a series of events,
somewhat like a picaresque story. The last, the “true narrative,"
allows for each incident to develop out of the previous one, and at
the same time elaborating a new aspect of the theme or situation.
The ending is usually entailed within the initial situation.
Five-year-olds, in some cases, are capable of telling true narra-
tives, although sometimes even older children have difficulty with
them. Children in the preoperational stage of conceptual develop-
ment are more likely to produce the unfocused chain narrative or
the focused chain narrative, a finding important for the analysis
of my data, discussed further in Chapter IV.
The textual analysis of more sophisticated fiction demands
much more than the story grammars or schemata used in the literature
reviewed up to this point. Discourse analysis in the field of
literary criticism is considerably broader, with a view of narrative
as two-dimensional: story--the internal relations of action and
character, and discourse--the set of external relations between
narrator and reader (or listener) that includes such things as time,
42 Seymour Chatman has written exten-
aspect, and mode of narrative.
sively about narrative transmission in discourse. In an early
article (1969) he discusses discourse as the literary aspect of
the narrative:
27
Story events as such are nonliterary: they have no necessary
connection with discourse. They could as easily be repro-
duced in a silent movie with no captions or a comic strip
without words. . . . Given the fact that a story is a story
in language the question is "What are the properties of the
linguistic modus, the verbal means by which the author (as
opposed to a silent-film director or comic strip artist)
communicates the story to his audience?"43
In a later article (1975) Chatman further develops his
concept of the second dimension of narrative as the set of external
relations between narrator and reader:
The initial question, then, is whether a narrator is present,
and if he is, how his presence is recognized and how strongly
it is felt by the audience. The narrator comes into existence
when the story itself is made to seem a demonstrable act of
communication. If an audience feels that it is in some sense
spoken tn_(regardless of the medium), then the existence of a
teller must be presumed.44
Discursive structure, then, the second dimension of narrative,
involves the relationship between narrator and reader and the extent
to which the narrator makes his presence felt in the narrative.
Varieties of narrative transmission range from a primarily unmediated
story with no intervention by the narrator, along a continuum to a
highly mediated narrative with considerable intervention by the
narrator.
While Chatman makes it clear that he is discussing fictional
rather than personal narrative, some interesting parallels can be
drawn between Chatman's view of fictional narration and William
Labov's view of historical or personal narration. In "The Trans-
formation of Experience in Narrative Syntax" (1972), Labov explores
the narrative structure of experiences related by children and
adolescents concerning a brush with death or a dangerous situation.
28
The only essential element for a minimal narrative is a sequence
of two clauses which are temporally ordered, having a beginning,
a middle, and an end. But in his research on personal experience
narratives, Labov discovered that most narratives contain other
elements as well. A fully-formed narrative may contain all of the
following elements: an abstract, an orientation, complicating
45 Each of
action, evaluation, result or resolution, and a coda.
these is explained in full in Chapters IV and V. Labov is suggest-
ing, like Chatman in his discussion of fictional narrative, that
personal narrative is usually more complex than merely setting and
plot. Like Chatman, Labov sees narrative as two-dimensional: the
story, characterization, plot on the one hand, and the relationship
between narrator and audience on the other. The two dimensions are
inextricably bound together in the total narrative.
This second dimension of narrative involves primarily the
evaluation of the narrative. According to Labov, it is this element
of narrative structure that has not been discussed in the literature
to any extent, even though it is perhaps the most important element
in addition to the basic narrative clause.46 The evaluation is the
means by which the narrator indicates the point of the narrative,
its reason for being told, what the narrator is getting at. Labov
explains:
There are many ways to tell the same story, to make very
different points, or to make no point at all. Pointless
stories are met (in English) with the withering rejoinder,
"So what?" Every good narrator is continually warding off
this question; when his narrative is over, it should be
29
unthinkable for a bystander to say, "So what?" Instead,
the appropriate remark would be, "He did?“ or similar
means of registering the4reportable character of the
events of the narrative.
Labov's concept of evaluation, the means by which the narrator makes
the story reportable, appears to be similar to Chatman's explanation
of the kinds and degrees of narrator intervention. Their two-
dimensional view of narrative is very important for the analysis of
my data.
Labov's study, furthermore, ties evaluation in narrative to
certain syntactic features; in other words, evaluation involves not
just what is said but how it is said. Particular syntactic features
provide a means of evaluation, and the use of these structures, to
some extent, reflects the linguistic abilities of children at varying
ages. The control of narrative structure, in part, is dependent on
the syntactic control of the narrator.
As such, the control of narrative structure is related to the
chronological age and the particular stage of linguistic maturity of
the narrator, a point to be discussed extensively in Chapter V. Like
Labov, Kernan (1977) studies the narratives of three groups of child-
ren of varying ages, and he uses Labov's method of analysis to discuss
evaluative elements in narrative discourse.
While the amount of literature and research on narrative
discourse applicable to my study is limited, the research cited has
provided valuable insight into the nature and structure of narrative.
The story schema of Stein and Glenn and the two-dimensional view of
narrative provided by Chatman and Labov will provide the framwork
30
for the analysis of the narratives produced in my study. Of par-
ticular importance is the work of Labov which provides the framework
for the analysis of evaluation and syntax in narrative structure.
FOOTNOTES--CHAPTER I
1William Labov, "Variation in Language," in The Learning of
Lan ua e, ed. Carroll E. Reed (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1971). pp. 187-8.
2Roy O'Donnell, William Griffin, and Raymond Norris,
Syntax of Elementary School Children: A Transformational Analysis
(Champaign: NCTE, 1967), p. 3.
3Ruth G. Strickland, The Language of Elementary School
Children: Its Relationship to the Language of ReadingnTextbooks
and the uality of Reading_of Selected Children (Bloomington:
Indiana university, Bulletin of the School of Education, 1962),
p. 16.
4
5
Ibid., p. 60.
Ibid., p. 102.
6Walter D. Loban, The Language of Elementary School
Children: A Studynof the Use and Control of Language Effectiveness
in Communication, and the Relations Among Speaking, Reading, Writing,
and Listening (Champaign: NCTE,71963), p. 7.
7
8Strang and Hocker, "First-Grade Children's Language
Patterns," Elementary English, 42 (1965), 38-41.
9Paula Menyuk, "Syntactic Structures in the Language of
Children," Child Development, 34 (1963), 408.
Ibid.. PP. 82-6.
10Carol Chomsky, The Acquisition of Syntax in Children from
5 to 10 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), p. 120.
HKellogg Hunt, Grammatical Structures Written at Three
Grade Levels (Champaign: NCTE, 1965), p. 3.
12
Ibid., p. 5.
31
32
13Jean Malmstrom and Constance Weaver, "Syntactic Maturity
and Syntactic Appropriateness in Teaching Writing," in Current Topics
in Language: Introductory Readings, ed. Nanc Ainsworth Johnson
(Cambridge, Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, 1976 , p. 349.
14
Hunt, p. 142.
151bid.. p. 89.
16
17
18John J. Gumperz, "Introduction," in Directions in Socio-
linguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, ed. Gumperz and
HymesTNew York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972), p. 15.
1gDell Hymes, "Models of the Interaction of Language and
Social Life," in Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography
of Communication, ed. Gumperz and Hymes (New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1972), p. 57.
20
21
Ibid., p. 143.
O'Donnell, et al., pp. 77-9.
Ibid., p. 56.
Ibid., pp. 58-65.
22Martin Joos, The Five Clocks (New York: Harcourt, Brace
and World, 1961), pp. 19-39.
23Susan Ervin-Tripp, "On Sociolinguistic Rules: Alternation
and Co-occurrence," in Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnog-
raphynof Communication, ed. Gumperz and Hymes (New York: Holt,
Rinehart and Winston, 1972), pp. 233-5.
24William Labov, "The Reflection of Social Processes in
Linguistic Structures," in Current Topics in Language: Introductory
Readings, ed. Nancy Ainsworth JohnsonTCambridge, Mass.: Winthrop
Publishers, 1976), pp. 143-4.
251 am, of course, talking about productive control of styles,
with the assumption that receptive control of stylistic variations
does exist, for the most part, for most adolescents and children.
26Johanna S. DeStefano, "Register: Social Variation in
Language Use," in Language and the Language Arts, ed. DeStefano and
Fox (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1974), p. 21.
27
Strang and Hocker, pp. 38-41.
33
28Rudolph Troike, "Receptive Bidialectalism: Implications
for Second-Dialect Teaching," in Current Topics in Language: .
Introductory Readings, ed. Nancy Ainsworth Johnson (Cambridge,
Mass.: Winthrop Publishers, 1976), p. 95.
29Julie Jensen, "A Comparative Investigation of the Casual
and Careful Oral Language Styles of Average and Superior Fifth Grade
Boys and Girls,“ Research in the Teaching of English, 7, No. 3
(1973), 341.
3OIbid., p. 345.
31
O'Donnell, et al., pp. 80-2.
32Kellogg Hunt, Syntactic Maturity in Schoolchildren and
Adults, Monqgraphs of the Society for Research in Child Development,
35 (1970). p. 54.
33Mike Pope, "The Syntax of Fourth Graders' Narrative and
Explanatory Speech," Research in the Teaching of English, 8 (1974),
22.
34Jean Mandler and Nancy S. Johnson,"Remembrance of Things
Parsed: Story Structure and Recall," Cognitive ngcholngy, 9 (1977),
111.
351bid., p. 113.
36Juri M. Latman, "Notes on the Structure of a Literary
Text," Semiotica, 15 (1975), 201.
37Mandler and Johnson, p. 115.
38Nancy L. Stein and Christine G. Glenn, "An Analysis of
Story Comprehension in Elementary School Children: A Test of a
Schema," ERIC, No. ED 121474, 1975, p. 25.
391bid.
40111111., p. 20.
41Arthur N. Applebee, The Child's Concept of Story(Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 72.
42Seymour Chatman, "New Ways of Analyzing Narrative Struc-
ture, With an Example from Joyce's Dubliners," Language and Style,
2 (1969), 3'4.
43Ibid.. pp. 30-1.
34
44Seymour Chatman, "The Structure of Narrative Transmission,
in Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics,
ed. Roger Fowler (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 215.
_ 45William Labov, "The Transformation of Experience in Nar-
rative Syntax," in Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black
En lish Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
972 , p. 363.
46
Ibid., p. 366.
47Ibid.
CHAPTER II
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
The impetus for my study was an informal analysis of
stylistic variation conducted by Bradford Arthur, reported in
Teaching English to Speakers of English (1973). He studied the
variations existing between two versions of the Cinderella fairy
tale told by a third grade girl on two separate occasions. On the
first occasion she was given the task of telling the story for
practice as preparation for a retelling of the same story at a
later time. The second version, she was told, would be recorded
and written down as a formal story. The stylistic differences that
Arthur records between the two versions include morphological,
syntactic, and lexical differences. From his analysis Arthur
discovered that the second, more formal version contained fewer
sentences beginning with the coordinating conjunction ang; a
greater variety of other conjoining words and phrases like and_
while, but then, and at once, when, by that time, etc; more syntac-
tic word-order inversions like "once upon a time there lived a little
girl named Cinderella"; a greater number of subordinte clauses func-
tioning as adverbs of time; an increase in sentence complexity, with
fewer simple sentences conjoined by ang, like "When the prince saw
her, he was delighted, and danced with her all evening"; complete
35
36
consistency in the use of the past tense; and a more formal lexicon,
like the verb nept_for grjeg,] 1
Arthur theorizes that young children are already beginning
to master a formal style in addition to an informal one: "Her per-
formance clearly indicates that her passive assimilation of literary
prose enabled her to produce an approximation of such prose herself,
with little difficulty and no special training or encouragement."2
Arthur's informal study, I felt, deserved replication on a
larger scale. While Arthur's general hypothesis about the control
of language styles by children had been supported by some of the
research cited in the first chapter, no formal study had been done
using Arthur's particular methodology. Even more significantly,
few studies have been done on the control of narrative structure by
children. Arthur's methodology, it seemed to me, offered a useful
approach for such analysis. To make the study more interesting I
felt it would be beneficial to look not only at the informal and
formal oral language of third graders but also at the language
samples of somewhat older, more "language-experienced" sixth graders
and include a comparison of the two groups.
11195;;
In general, my hypothesis is that children, as early as the
third grade, are already gaining control of more than one register
or style. Such children are gaining flexibility in the use of
language and are making more or less conscious choices regarding
language use. Stylistic variations in syntax, vocabulary, and
37
discourse structure exist between children's casual oral style
and their more formal oral style of narrative discourse. I am
defining informal style on the basis of Jensen's (1973) definition
of casual speech as that which is informal, spontaneous, and relaxed;
and formal style on the basis of her definition of formal speech as
that associated with a mental set in which more attention is paid to
the manner of speaking.3 A switch from one style to the other is
related to the variables discussed by Hymes (1972), including par-
ticipants in and purposes of the speech act.
More specifically, my first hypothesis is that the formal
style of both third graders and sixth graders, compared to their
informal styles, will show greater syntactic complexity; a more
complete, carefully motivated, and coherent narrative structure; a
more formal lexicon and usage; and a greater use of evaluation ele-
ments correlating with the increase in syntactic complexity. My
second hypothesis is that sixth graders, compared to third graders,
will have greater control of stylistic variation and will demonstrate
a greater degree of syntactic complexity in both informal and formal
styles, and will have greater control of narrative discourse. My
third hypothesis is that the formal oral style these students pro-
duce will approximate written language--that formal oral and written
forms share certain features. O'Donnell did compare the oral with
the written discourse in his study, but he made no distinction
between informal and formal oral; his methodology made no provision
for eliciting one kind of oral response more than the other.
38
I am interested throughout the study in comparing my results
based on these three hypotheses with the results of studies reviewed
in Chapter I.
Population and Sample
The study was conducted with the cooperation of the Lansing
Public Schools at Lyons Avenue Elementary School. The thirty stu-
dents for the study were drawn from two grade levels, third and
sixth. The third grade was selected specifically in an attempt to
replicate Bradford Arthur's study, and the sixth grade was selected
largely so that developmental trends in language learning and use
could be evaluated in a comparison of the two grade levels.
Lyons Avenue School is located in the south part of Lansing,
in a relatively stable lower-middle class neighborhood, as defined
by the principal and the classroom teachers. The school population
has a larger percentage of white children than Black or Mexican-
American. My sampling was white, with the exception of one black
sixth grader. Because the school is relatively small, the fifteen
third grade females and the fifteen sixth grade females used in my
study represent the majority of students of that sex in each of the
two grades.
I limited my study to females, largely in order to eliminate
the sex variable. John B. Carroll (1971) maintains that sex is, by
4
all accounts, an important variable in language development. An
article by Dorothea A. McCarthy (1970) suggests that boys are
39
slightly later than girls in practically all aspects of language
development: A
These differences seldom are statistically significant, but
the careful observer cannot ignore the amazing consistency
with which these small differences appear in one investi-
gation after another, each being conducted by a different
experimenter, employing different techniques, different
subjects, and sampling different geographical populations.5
She goes on to cite study after study corroborating her statement.
A study by Rubin (1972) shows that boys are behind girls in language
and reading-readiness skills when they enter kindergarten.6
Gunderson
(1976) correlates the fact that boys have more difficulty learning to
read with their later language development compared to girls, but she
also suggests that many of these differences may have their roots in
the characteristic differences between the ways boys and girls are
reared and socialized.7 Carroll suggests much the same thing, and
he goes on to say that "it is possible that current cultural and
social trends in the U.S. are working towards reducing differences
between boys and girls in language development."8 Whether, in fact,
there are significant differences between the language development
of girls and boys, and whether or not these differences are being
mitigated by current child-rearing trends, it seemed wise to limit
my study to one sex to avoid any possible differences between boys'
and girls' language development. For this reason I chose to study
the language of the girls only.
Procedure
To elicit narrative discourse, I selected two fairy tales,
"Cinderella" and "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," to be told by
40
the children. These two tales are quite familiar to most children,
either through the story book mode or through the Walt Disney ani-
mated cartoon versions of both tales. I also felt that the two
stories were reasonably similar in their complexity of plot, char-
acter, etc. I tried to limit the stories to these two, although
one third grader and two sixth graders knew only "The Three Bears,"
and one sixth grader told "The Three Little Pigs." Unless otherwise
stated, my figures on syntactic complexity are based on data from
all the stories, but my results on narrative structure reflect only
the data from "Cinderella" and "Snow White" because of the nature of
the analysis.
Most of the tape-recordings were done in a small room
adjoining the main sixth-grade classroom. It was quiet and private
with few possibilities for distractions. The room contained a table,
three or four chairs, and two filing cabinets. I sat behind the
table during both the casual and formal tapings, and the child in
each situation sat across the table from me. During the first set
of tapings the tape-recorder containing a remote microphone was on
a chair next to me,hidden from view of the child. During the second
taping, however, the recorder was placed on the table in full view.
For five of the third grade formal tapings it was necessary
for me to use the hallway outside the third grade classroom because
the other room was in use at the time. This might have introduced
some variation in my results, but I tried to make the setting as
close to that of the room as possible. We sat opposite each other in
scaled-to-size chairs, with the tape-recorder on a chair next to us.
41
For the first set of tapings I asked each child to tell me
either the story of "Cinderella" or "Snow White and the Sevenâ€
Dwarfs" in their own words, as well as they were able to remember
it. I told them this was a practice session but that I would be
back the following week to ask them to tell the story again into a
tape-recorder so that I could record it and write it down as their
version of the story for other children to read.
The second set of tapings occurred a week later. This time
I had the recorder in view and explained that I would be taping
their stories and then typing them up for other children to read.
None of the children asked questions during their story-
telling experiences, except for two of them who mixed up their
beginning and asked to start over. I allowed them to begin again.
My role as interviewer was to simply listen to the stories. I
provided little verbal encouragement, although I occasionally smiled
and nodded my head slightly as an encouragement to continue. These
non-verbal cues are normal interactional cues, and their absence
would have distorted the situation.
The task was changed from one session to the next in two
ways: the purpose and goal of the task was changed from a practice
session to dictating a story for other children to read, and the
physical environment was changed because of the presence of a tape-
recorder which would contribute to a more formal atmosphere. The
story or subject, the participants, the channel of transmission,
and the mode of discourse remained the same. My assumption in
setting up the study in this way was that even with the relatively
42
minor changes from one interview to the other, the change in the
purpose and goal of the task would be sufficient to demonstrate
stylistic variations.
Method of Analysis
In this study Kellogg Hunt (1965) defined syntactic maturity
as the observed characteristics of writers in an older grade and as
such demonstrated the correlation between syntactic "maturity“ and
syntactic complexity, as did O'Donnell in his study. Because other
connotations exist for the meaning of syntactic "maturity," however,
as discussed in Chapter I, I prefer to use the term "complexity" in
my study.
I chose to use Hunt's T-Unit as the basic measure of syn-
tactic complexity, a measure relatively easy to use and one that a
number of researchers have used confidently as an accurate measure
of such complexity. Hunt and O'Donnell, Griffin, and Norris in
their study found that the best indicator was the length of the
T-Unit, the second best was the length of clauses, resulting from
the increased use of sentence-combining transformations and deletion
transformations, and the third best indicator was the number of
clauses per T-Unit. O'Donnell, et a1. state:
This investigation supports the finding by Hunt (1964, 1965)
that when fairly extensive samples of children's language
are obtained, the mean length of T-Units has special claim
to consideration as a simple, objective, valid indicator of
development in syntactic control.
Although I am using this basic measure of syntactic complexity, some
qualifications of this view will be offered during later analysis,
43
in relation to the length of T-Units produced by the children in
my study.
I divided each of the language samples of my third and sixth
graders (found in the Appendix) into T-Units; each T-Unit consists
of one main clause plus any subordinate clauses or phrases attached
to or embedded in the main clause.
The syntactic analysis involves a two-by—two comparison of
the data--a comparison of the third grade casual with the sixth
grade casual and third formal with sixth formal, and a comparison
of third casual with third formal and sixth casual with sixth formal.
'0 The
Much of the syntactic analysis uses Hunt's T-Unit analysis.
analysis of narrative structure is based primarily on the work of
William Labov, with major contributions from Chatman, Applebee, and
Stein and Glenn.
FOOTNOTES--CHAPTER II
1Bradford Arthur, Teaching English to Speakers of English
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, Javanovich, Inc., 1973), pp. 62-4.
2
Ibid., p. 64.
3Julie Jensen, "A Comparative Investigation of the Casual
and Careful Oral Language Styles of Average and Superior Fifth Grade
Boys and Girls," Research in the Teaching of English, 7, No. 3 (1973),
341.
4John B. Carroll, "Development of Natural Language Skills
Beyond the Early Years," in The Learning of Language, ed. Carroll E.
Reed (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1971), p. 147.
5Dorothea A. McCarthy, "Sex Differences in Language Develop-
ment," in Paychological Studies of Human Develnpment, ed. Raymond
Kuhlen and George Thompson (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,
1970). p. 349.
6Rosalyn Rubin, "Sex Differences in Effects of Kindergarten
Attendance on Development of School Readiness and Language Skills,"
Elementary School Journal, 72 (1972), 272.
7Doris V. Gunderson, "Sex Differences in Language and Read-
ing," Language Arts (March 1976), 302.
8
Carroll, p. 148.
90'Donnell, et al., pp. 98-9.
10Each of the syntactic variables analyzed in this study
involved the application of the T-test for statistical significance
at the .05 level. The only variable in which the difference was
significant at the .05 level was the sixth graders' increase in the
use of the three-clause T-Unit from four percent (casual) to eight
percent (formal).
44
CHAPTER III
SYNTACTIC ANALYSIS
T-Unit Analysis
The measure of syntactic complexity developed by Kellogg
Hunt and used by a number of other researchers is the T-Unit, a
minimal terminable unit which consists of one main clause plus any
subordinate clauses or phrases attached to or embedded in the main
clause. The length of the T-Unit, the length of clauses within
T-Units, and the number of clauses per T-Unit have been used in
syntactic analysis as valid indicators of development in syntactic
control. Using these measures as a basis for determining syntactic
elaboration, I analyzed the syntactic data of the children in my
study with two major questions in mind: Is the increase in chrono-
logical age from third graders to sixth graders accompanied by an
increase in syntactic elaboration? Does a formal situation encourage
the production of greater syntactic elaboration? A third question,
not directly resulting from my data but suggested by a comparison of
my data with the data in other research, is one related to written
style: Does the formal oral style approximate the syntactic elabor-
ation of written style? While my own study did not involve writing
samples, some assumptions can be made about the relationship between
45
46
Speech and writing by comparing my data on formal oral style with
Hunt's and O'Donnell's data on oral and written styles.
Using Kellogg Hunt's definition of T-Units, I analyzed the
fifteen samples each of casual and formal oral styles at each grade
level in terms of average number of words per sample, average T-Unit
length, average clause length, and average number of clauses per
T-Unit. The results are listed in Table 1.
TABLE l.--T-Unit Analysis: Average Number of Words per Sample, Words
per T-Unit, Words per Clause, and Clauses per T-Unit.
Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
T-Unit Analysis (N = 15) (N = 15)
Number of Words per Sample
Casual 366 285
Formal 465 373
Words per T-Unit
Casual 8.0 8.5
Formal 8.5 8.6
Words per Clause
Casual 6.4 6.8
Formal 6.5 6.6
Clauses per T-Unit
Casual 1.25 1.25
Formal 1.30 1.30
At both grade levels, as expected, an increase in the average
number of words per story occurred from the casual to the formal
styles, possibly because the more formal demands an increase in the
47
number of details, a factor to be discussed at greater length in
Chapter IV. One must also consider the possibility of the "rehearsal“
effect on their fluency. They had rehearsed the story for me during
the first session which might possibly have increased their fluency
during the second. The fact that a week intervened between sessions,
however, lessens this possibility.
At the same time that there was an increase in story length
from casual to formal, there was a decrease in the length from third
graders to sixth graders in both styles. One explanation for this
disparity is that sixth graders may be farther removed from the
fairy-tale telling mode than third graders are in terms of both age
and interest; sixth graders may simply not recall as many details or
they may not be as involved in the task of telling fairy tales. A
further explanation is that sixth graders may have a keener sense of
audience and may assume that the listener already knows the details.
They may choose, consequently, to tell only the key points of the
narrative, a point to be discussed further in Chapters IV and V.
However, the data are inconclusive on this point.
O'Donnell's study of written and oral language showed that
in both speech and writing, the total length of responses increased
with every grade level. O'Donnell's subjects, it is recalled, nar—
rated the story of a film they had just seen, so that it is possible
that the immediacy of the recall affected the length of the narra-
tions, unlike the situation where the recall of the fairy tale
occurs, very probably, long after the last time the tale had been
read, seen, or heard, especially for the older sixth graders.
48
In the other three categories, length of T-Unit, length of
clause, and number of clauses per T-Unit, the expected increase from
casual to formal did occur for both grade levels, the only exception
being the clause length for sixth graders in which a slight decrease
occurred from casual to formal--6.8 words per clause to 6.6. The
greatest increase was the jump for the third graders from 8.0 words
per T-Unit for casual to 8.5 for formal, the category according to
Hunt that is the best indicator of syntactic complexity. Interest-
ingly, the increase in clauses per T-Unit from 1.25 to 1.30 was
identical for both grade levels. The language performance of the
sixth graders showed a slight increase in syntactic elaboration over
the performance of the third graders in length of T—Unit and in
length of clauses, with the number of clauses per T-Unit remaining
identical from third to sixth grades in both styles. On the basis
of T-Unit analysis, my data show a trend from casual to formal style
towards increasing syntactic elaboration. The data also suggest
that, in most cases, an increase in chronological age is accompanied
by greater syntactic elaboration in language performance.
My original hypothesis that a formal oral style is an
approximation of written style must be reconsidered in light of my
data. While my analysis shows some differences in syntactic elab-
oration between casual and formal oral styles, there may also be a
greater difference between formal oral and written styles in terms
of such elaboration and a more complex relationship between them
than I first hypothesized. An interesting comparison can be made
between the data for my formal oral style and the data for the
49
written language samples analyzed in Hunt's and O'Donnell's studies.
The combined figures of Hunt and O'Donnell appearing in the following
table have been adapted from Frank O'Hare's (1973) discussion of
1 The table includes my figures
their research in his NCTE Report.
on formal oral style and contrasts them with the figures of Hunt and
O'Donnell on written style.
TABLE 2.--Average Number of Words per T-Unit, Words per Clause, and
Clauses per T-Unit.
Grade Level
T-Unit Analysis 3 4 5 6 7 8 12
Words/T-Unit
Wilson 8.5 8.6
(formal oral)
O'Donnell 7.7 9.3 9.9
(written)
Hunt 8.5 11.3 14.4
(written)
Words/Clause
Wilson 6.5 6.6
(formal oral)
O'Donnell 6.5 7.4 7.7
(written)
Hunt 6.6 8.1 8.6
(written)
Clauses/T-Unit
Wilson 1.30 1.30
(formal oral)
O'Donnell 1.18 1.27 1.30
(written)
Hunt 1.29 1.42 1.68
(written)
50
My data, when compared with Hunt's and O'Donnell's, suggest
that the fOrmal oral style is one of a repertoire of stylistic vari-
ations rather than an approximation of written. It is true that for
words per clause my figure of 6.5 for third graders is identical to
the 6.5 of O'Donnell's third graders. But figures in other cate-
gories are considerably different. In two categories, length of
T-Unit and length of clause, the formal oral figures of my sixth
graders are lower than the figures for the written style of
O'Donnell's fifth and seventh graders, although the number of
clauses per T-Unit is about the same. For sixth graders, at least,
the formal oral language does not appear to show the same type of
syntactic elaboration that written language does. It appears that
these differences are great enough to establish f0rmal oral as dif-
ferent from written, an assumption that is substantiated by research
cited later in this chapter as well.
One complication, however, is the fact that the distance
between formal oral and written fluctuates considerably, depending
on grade level, and in fact becomes reversed for third graders. In
T-Unit length the figures for my sixth graders' formal oral, 8.6,
is lower than the 9.3 of O'Donnell's fifth graders, just as in clause
length my sixth graders' 6.6 is below the 7.4 of O'Donnell's fifth
graders. However, the average T-Unit length of my third graders'
formal oral style is 8.5, higher than the 7.7 of O'Donnell's third
graders, and the average number of clauses per T-Unit for my third
graders, 1.30, is slightly higher than the 1.18 for O'Donnell's
third graders.
51
Although these figures may reflect the size of the sample,
the specific school, etc., they may also reflect the complex rela-
tionship between oral and written language at various grade levels.
They may provide some evidence that the control of syntax and the
development of syntactic elaboration may vary with the channel
(oral or written) for different grade levels. It is not surprising
to find less syntactic control in the writing of third graders than
in their speaking, considering the more difficult psycho-motor
control required for the writing task, especially for children just
becoming familiar with this channel. But it is an interesting fact
that sixth graders' oral language does not show the same kinds of
syntactic elaboration as their written language. My results are
substantiated by O'Donnell's study; he found that the length of
T-Units was significantly greater in oral than in written expression
in grade three, but that the length of the T-Units in writing was
greater than that in speech at grades five and seven.
A possible explanation for this disparity between oral and
written in grades five, six, and seven is the frequently greater
emphasis on formal writing than on formal speaking in schoolroom
activities or assignments; energies are perhaps being directed
toward written expression. The circumstances in most third grade
classrooms are likely to be reversed: writing is just beginning to
be emphasized, while the other channel of communication is speech.
A second possible explanation is the growing awareness at
the upper grade level of the need for greater redundancy in written
language, which would tend to increase the length of T-Units.
52
Probably unconsciously, students in the process of developing their
writing skills become aware that written language cannot rely on the
non-verbal cues accompanying oral language or on the immediate feed-
back available in normal speech situations. Therefore writing must
make greater use of verbal redundancy.
My T-Unit analysis points to the conclusion that while there
are differences in syntactic elaboration between casual and formal
styles at both grade levels and between both grade levels in each of
the styles, the greater differences appear to be between the casual
and formal oral styles of the third graders. They are developing
stylistic flexibility primarily in oral language, while the sixth
graders appear to be developing greater syntactic flexibility and
syntactic elaboration in written language, according to the com-
parison of my study with O'Donnell's.
I have been looking primarily at length up to this point.
But I must raise some important questions about T-Unit analysis.
Does the increase in T-Unit length always mean an increase in
syntactic complexity? Or can this length be interpreted as merely
an increase in verbosity? Length of T-Unit or clause alone is not
a sufficient index of complexity; what the T-Unit or clause consists
of in terms of embedded elements, etc., is crucial for determining
if complexity actually exists. One can either say, "I know the man
who is sitting in the car," or "I know the man sitting in the car."
Certainly the first T-unit is longer than the second, but it is by
no means more complex. In terms of the number of transformations
performed on the deep structure of the sentence, the second, shorter
53
T-Unit is in fact more complex; the clause modifier "who is sitting
in the car" has been reduced by a deletion transformation to “sitting
in the car" (and could be reduced further to "in the car"). A
decrease in clause length or T-Unit length may be evidence of greater
syntactic control if one considers the fact that as children's lan-
guage matures, it becomes more concise.
Is it possible, then, that the shorter T-Units and clauses
found in the oral language of the sixth graders in my study, compared
to the longer T-Units found in the writing of Hunt's and O'Donnell's
subjects of comparable ages, is a reflection of more conciseness in
their oral language? One of the best indicators of conciseness is
2 Such modifiers, when
the use of non-clause modifiers of nouns.
reduced from full adjective clauses, provide phrases like "the red
car" from "the car that is red," or "the book on the table" from
"the book that is on the table." Because Hunt and O'Donnell tested
a broader range of non-clause modifiers of nouns than I did in my
study, our specific results cannot be compared. But O'Donnell found
a higher number of such modifiers in the writing of his fifth and
seventh grade students than in their speech, although he found large
overall increases from one grade to another in this kind of modifi-
cation in both speech and writing.3
It is doubtful, then, that the shorter T-Units and clauses
in the oral language of the sixth graders in this study can be
attributed to greater conciseness. It is possible that greater
emphasis on writing in classroom activities in the sixth grade and
an increased awareness on the part of sixth graders for the need for
54
more redundancy in written language contribute to the longer T-Units
in their writing, although this is somewhat speculative.
Hunt's and O'Donnell's claim that T—Unit length is a valid
indicator of development in syntactic control rests not on length
alone but on the correlation they found between T-Unit length and
syntactic complexities within T-Units. At the same time that
increases in length of T-Units occur from one grade level to another,
in spite of the fact that students increasingly develop an ability
to reduce clauses and phrases for greater conciseness, the occurrence
of syntactic sentence-combining transformations also increases.4 An
analysis of several syntactic complexities follows in subsequent
sections of this chapter.
Non-Clause Modifiers of Nouns
One way of increasing both clause length and T-Unit length
is to increase the number of non-clause optional elements that are
added to the minimal elements of the clause. Hunt maintains that
the major lengthening of clauses and T-Units occurs as an expansion
of nominals whereby adjective clauses are reduced to non—clause
modifiers of nouns in adjoining clauses, an opportunity often missed
by young writers.5
My study of noun modification in oral language (excluding
adjective clauses to be discussed later) includes adjectives (the
reg_car), prepositional phrases (the man in the car), participles
(the man sitting in the car), appositives (the old woman, the wicked
55
witch), and adverbs (this girl here). The results of my analysis
of non—clause modifiers of nouns are listed below in Table 3.
TABLE 3.--Ratio of Non-Clause Modifiers of Nouns per T-Unit.
Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
(N =15) (N =15)
Casual .12 .13
Formal .15 .17
My data show an increase in the use of such modifiers both
from casual to formal style and from third to sixth grade. The
greater increases are from casual to formal styles at both grade
levels. As previously mentioned, both Hunt and O'Donnell found
increases in noun modification from one grade level to another,
Hunt's eighth graders writing about a third more modifiers of nouns
per clause than the fourth graders did,6 and O'Donnell reporting
large overall increases in this kind of modification in both speech
and writing. It appears, then, that increased noun modification is
one of the factors in syntactic complexity.
Types of Subordinate Clauses
Any increase in the ratio of clauses per T-Unit or in the
length of T-Units is accounted for, in part, by the increased use of
subordinate clauses, a factor discussed in the section on T-Unit
analysis. But beyond looking at the increases in subordinate clauses,
one can gain insight into developmental language patterns by
56
observing the frequency of types of clauses at varying grade levels.
Studies in syntax have characteristically divided the types of
subordinate clauses into three: adverbial, which are often movable,
as in "When he arrives, we'll leave," and "We'll leave when he
arrives"; nominal, which often function as direct objects or sub-
jects, as in "I thought that he said yes," and "What he said is no
concern of ours"; and adjectival, which function as modifiers of
nouns, as in "The persons who came were strangers," and "He's the
one that I mentionednyesterday."
My hypothesis regarding frequency of types of subordinate
clauses was that a difference in chronological age, and therefore
a difference in degree of syntactic control, might reflect a dif-
ference in the frequency of one or more clause types. Would the
adjectival clause, for example, increase in use for sixth graders?
At the same time I was interested in seeing what, if any, differ-
ences occurred in the frequency of one or more types of clauses
between casual and formal oral language styles. Table 4 contains
the breakdown of these subordinate clause types for each of the
grade levels and for each of the styles.
Looking first at the differences between casual and formal
oral style, one sees in both grade levels a small increase in the
use of each type of clause. No one type of clause appears to
increase in use substantially over any other. The figures do show,
however, that adverbial and nominal clauses are used with greater
frequency than adjectival clauses at both grade levels and in both
oral styles.
57
TABLE 4.--Ratio of Subordinate Clause Types per T-Unit.
Clause Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
, Types (N = 15) (N = 15)
Adverbial
Casual .091 .102
Formal .109 .121
Nominal
Casual .132 .120
Formal .150 .136
Adjectival
Casual .026 .029
Formal .038 .038
Increases in the use of subordinate clause types from third
grade to sixth grade occur only in the adverbials in both casual and
formal styles; the use of adjectivals increases from third to sixth
grade only in the casual style and remains the same in formal style.
The most interesting fact is the decrease in frequency of nominals
from third to sixth grade in both styles. Even though the decrease
is slight, it may be accounted for, in part, by the decreased use of
dialogue, both direct and indirect, on the part of the sixth graders,
who were less likely than the third graders to use constructions such
as, “And then Snow White said, 'Why don't you . . ." or “She said
that the dwarfs should . . ." This factor is discussed further in
Chapter IV.
The most consistent increase in use of subordinate clause
types is from casual to formal at both grade levels rather than
58
between grade levels. Each type of clause increases slightly from
casual to formal for third and sixth graders. This fact, of course,
remains consistent with the general increase in length of T-Units
and in the higher frequency of subordinate clauses per T-Unit.
The fact that there is so little difference between the
third graders and sixth graders in this category, with the exception
of the decrease in the use of nominals, may be further evidence of
the developing oral style among third graders, while the stylistic
development of sixth graders may be occurring to a greater extent
in written style, as suggested previously.
Kellogg Hunt's study of written language showed a significant
increase in the use of adjectival clauses which doubled from fourth
to eighth grade.7 My study shows no such increase. The increase in
casual style from .026 for third graders to .029 for sixth graders is
minuscule, and no change whatsoever occurs from third to sixth in the
formal style. O'Donnell's study showed that kindergarten children
used adjectival clauses more frequently than did children at any
8 The significant increase
other age, in either speech or writing.
in use of adjectival clauses that Hunt found in his study was not
shown in O'Donnell's study. The disparity between these studies
regarding adjectival clauses needs further study. Hunt's hypothesis
that the use of adjectival clauses is a good indicator of syntactic
maturity is questionable in light of O'Donnell's study and the
evidence from my study.
The variable of genre or mode and its effect on types of
clauses is an interesting one. Hunt's samples consisted of a
59
variety of modes, but O'Donnell's were primarily narrative in
structure. O'Donnell's students were asked to discuss orally and
to write their versions of an animated story-film they had just
observed. The O'Donnell study found a steady increment from grades
one to three to five to seven in the use of nominal and adverbial
9 (Adjectival clauses were not
clauses in both speech and writing.
studied separately but were grouped with non-clause modifiers of
nouns for purposes of analysis.) Mike Pope's (1974) study of the
syntactic differences between fourth graders' narrative and explana-
tory speech showed that the use of adverbials and nominals were
significantly greater in explanatory speech than in narrative speech;
and in the comparison of this study with O'Donnell's, Pope points
out that the use of adverbial and nominal clauses by his fourth
graders in their explanatory speech exceeded the use of these types
of clauses by O'Donnell's seventh graders in their primarily nar-
10 Pope discovered, too, that the T-Units in explana-
rative speech.
tory speech are significantly longer than those in narrative speech,
and the ratio of clauses per T-Unit in the explanatory is signifi-
cantly higher than in the narrative.]] As a summation of the dif-
ferences between the two genres, Pope says:
. . . the syntactic complexity of the fourth graders' nar-
rative speech in this study is comparable to that of the
first and third graders' narrative speech in O'Donnell's
study, while the syntactic complexity in the explanatory
speech of the fourth graders in this study is comparable
to that of O'Donnell's fifth graders' narrative speech.
If, as Pope's study suggests, it is true that mode or genre
affects the length of T-Units, the ratio of subordinate clauses to
60
T-Units, and the types of clauses used, the relatively small
increases in these categories in my study from third to sixth and
from casual to formal may be accounted for, in part, by the nar-
rative genre. The effect of genre on syntactic complexity bears
further study.
Distribution of Clauses Among
Multi-Clause T-Units
Another measure of syntactic complexity related to, but
different from, the number of clauses per T-Unit is the pattern of
distribution of clauses among T-Units--the relative number of clauses
found in single-clause T-Units, two-clause T-Units, three-clause
T—Units, etc. For example, in "Then Cinderella quickly got dressed
and she went to the ball," each T-Unit contains only one clause.
In "When she got dressed, she went to the ball," the T-Unit contains
two clauses. And in "When her fairy godmother came, after she got
dressed, she went to the ball," the T-Unit contains three clauses.
My hypothesis was that syntactic complexity would be reflected in
the degree to which the students used multi-clause T-Units. For
example, are sixth graders likely to use a greater number of three-
clause T-Units than third graders, and is there a decrease in single-
clause T-Units from casual to formal oral style at either grade
level? Table 5 gives these figures.
One can see a stronger preference for single-clause T-Units
in the casual speech of both third and sixth graders than in the
formal, although the preference is still there in the formal. At
both grade levels the formal shows an increase over the casual in
61
TABLE 5.--Distribution of Clauses Among Multi-Clause T-Units.
Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
Clauses (N = 15) (N = 15)
Single-clause
Casual 63 percent 64 percent
Formal 58 58
Two-clause
Casual 29 30
Formal 33 32
Three-clause
Casual 10 04
Formal 11 08
Four—clause
Casual 04 07
Formal 01 O9
Five-clause
Casual 00 02
Formal OO 02
the percentage of clauses used in two-clause T—Units, from 29 to
33 percent for third graders and from 30 to 32 percent for sixth
graders. An increase also occurs from casual to formal for both
grades in the three- and four-clause T-Units. There was no inci—
dence of five-clause T-Units in either style of the third graders
and an extremely small percentage in the casual and formal of the
sixth graders.
These figures support the hypothesis of greater syntactic
complexity in formal style. At both grade levels a decrease occurs
62
from casual to formal in the use of single-clause T—Units, and an
increase occurs in the multi-clause T-Units.
I expected to find greater differences between third and
sixth graders. There was virtually no difference between them for
either style in the percentage of clauses in single-clause T-Units
and minimal difference in the two-clause T-Units for both styles.
Interestingly, the frequency of three-clause T-Units decreased from
third to sixth graders for both styles: from 10 percent (casual)
and 11 percent (formal) for third graders to 4 percent (casual) and
8 percent (formal) for sixth graders. Little change occurred in the
four-clause T-Unit between grades. Perhaps, as previously suggested,
the third graders have developed a formal oral style that functions
well enough to meet their conversational needs through the sixth
grade level. This aspect of a formal oral style is fairly well
established in children by the third grade and shows little change.
Once again the emerging pattern is one of greater differences between
styles rather than between grade levels. And, again, as previously
suggested, these speakers may be aware in some way that overly com-
plex structures will not function well in oral language--even in the
formal style.
Figure 1 shows the distribution of clauses among T-Units
compared with the results of a similar analysis done by Hunt in his
study of the writing of fourth, eighth, and twelfth graders.13
Because my hypothesis is that formal oral language is closer to
written than is casual oral, the graph contains the figures for
formal oral style in both grades.
63
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64
The graph shows the small degrees of difference between
the performance of third, fourth, and sixth graders in each cate-
gory.' It is interesting that the fourth grade written data, however,
shows a slightly higher percentage of single-clause T-Units (59.2)
and a slightly lower percentage of two-clause (30.2) and three clause
(8.7) T-Units than the third graders in their formal oral, 58, 33,
and 11 percent respectively. When one compares the figures for the
sixth grade oral with the eighth grade written, the reverse is true.
A large increase occurs in eighth grade written in the use of multi-
clause T-Units with a decrease in the use of single-clause T-Units.
These comparisons offer further support for the conclusion that those
syntactic structures being analyzed do develop in different patterns
within different channels of language performance.
Coordination of T-Units
One reason that sentence length is a poor indicator of
language complexity, aside from the fact that "sentence" is difficult
to define, is that younger children tend to use a large number of
coordinating conjunctions like I'and" or "and so" to conjoin main
clauses, resulting in extremely long sentences. This tendency
decreases significantly with age, according to Hunt's study. The
fourth graders in his study used more than three times as many coor-
dinating conjunctions to introduce T-Units in their writing as the
'4 Hunt is
twelfth graders did, and twice as many as eighth graders.
careful to state that the use of such conjunctions is not a gram-
matical problem, simply a stylistic one: "It is grammatically
65
allowable for almost any two adjoining declarative sentences to be
connected with an and, The fourth grader merely exercises that
option too often for mature taste."15 (Of course, this situation
is neither a grammatical nor a stylistic "problem" for children.
It is simply normal linguistic development.)
My own study, rather than finding a decrease in the use of
the initial coordinating conjunctions "and," "but," or "so" from
third to sixth grade, found an increase. The figures appear in
Table 6.
TABLE 6.--Rate of Occurrence of Initial Coordinating Conjunctions
per 100 T-Units.
Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
(N =15) (N =15)
Casual 76.7 83.5
Formal 70.7 80.8
The increase in both styles from third to sixth grade, while
differing from Hunt's data on writing, is consistent with O'Donnell's
data on speech, presented in the Table 7. My 76.7 (casual) and 70.7
(formal) for third grade compared with O'Donnell's figures of 72.79
are fairly close, as are my figures of 83.5 (casual) and 80.8 (formal)
for sixth grade compared with his figure of 81.25 for fifth grade.
(O'Donnell, it is recalled, made no distinction between casual and
formal speech. His subjects were asked to tell the story of an ani-
mated cartoon strip of two of Aesop's fables to an interviewer.)
66
TABLE 7.--0'Donnell's Study: Rate of Occurrenge of Initial Coordi-
nating Conjunctions per 100 T-Units.
Grade Level
3 5 7
Speech! 72.79 81.25 75.11
Writing 25.37 28.54 23.07
Looking at the differences in my study between oral casual
and formal styles at both grade levels, one finds the frequency of
coordinating conjunctions initiating T-Units to be high in both
styles, although a decrease occurs at both grade levels from casual
to formal--from 76.7 to 70.7 for third graders, and from 83.5 to
80.8 for sixth graders. This decrease suggests that the students
are exercising a sense of appropriateness as they shift styles,
third graders as well as sixth graders. This explanation is further
supported by O'Donnell's figures showing a dramatically significant
higher proportion in oral language than in writing. Obviously
children do distinguish between written and oral channels of dis-
course in their language performance, just as they distinguish
between casual and formal in oral. This significant difference in
the use of initial coordinating conjunctions between speech and
writing is evidence of the students' clear awareness of a difference
between appropriateness in the two different channels of discourse.
These findings add significantly to the small store of information
on acquisition of communicative competence.
67
Other Syntactic Complexities
An analysis of two other syntactic patterns, the passive
construction and the inverted sentence, has produced some interesting
results. Passive sentences are usually acquired later than active,
and inverted sentences in which SV(O) is inverted to VS(O) or in
which an adverbial is placed at the beginning of the sentence rather
than close to the word being modified are more likely to be found
in formal than in casual language performance. Both constructions
represent syntactic complexities because each one is a marked con-
struction--syntactically out of the ordinary.
The number of passives and inversions used by my third
graders and sixth graders is relatively small. In terms of total
numbers, six passives each were used by third graders and sixth
graders in their casual style; the number jumped to thirteen in the
formal style of third graders and to twelve in the formal style of
the sixth graders. Few inversions were used by either third or
sixth graders in either style. Table 8 provides the ratios of
passives and inversions per 100 T-Units.
Between grade levels we find slight increases. The major
increases occur from casual to formal style, particularly in the
use of passives. While the number of uses of each construction is
extremely small, one can still see a trend toward greater formality
in language as both third graders and sixth graders shift from
casual to formal oral language.
68
TABLE 8.--Ratio of Passives and Inversions per 100 T-Units.
Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
Structures (N = 15) (N = 15)
Passives
Casual .86 1.23
Formal . 1.62 1.84
Inversions
Casual .00 .20
Formal .37 .30
Examples of the third grade passives include "he got
stretched," I'Cinderella got locked upstairs," and "they got turned
into a man." The informal "got" construction for the passive was
used frequently in both casual styles. But other passives were also
used: "They were turned into a carriage," "he was chosen to go,“
and "the apple was poisoned," all third grade samples. Sixth
graders provided similar constructions.
The third grade inversions were: "Then came the seven
dwarfs into the house," "Out camea prince riding on a horse," and
"'A wicked stepmother,‘ said Grumpy," the latter being a rather
common example of inversion in passages of dialogue in print. All
three examples of third graders' inversions were in the formal style;
none appeared in the casual.
Two out of the three sixth graders' inversions also appeared
in the formal style. The three constructions are: "Then comes a
knock on the door," "Off they went," and "There came a telegram."
69
My conclusion is that the children's passive assimilation of
literary prose results in the occasional production of such prose
when the purpose of speech warrants its use.
Lexical Selection
Although lexical choice is not traditionally a part of
syntactic analysis, lexical selection in transformational analysis
is a part of the grammatical component and as such will be influenced
by the same factors as syntactic choice. A survey of the stories
shows that, to some extent, lexical selection is determined by the
purpose or goal of the story-teller. What we would consider to be
more formal diction was used with greater frequency in the formal
styles of both third and sixth graders than in their casual. I am
defining formal diction as that which is marked--out of the ordinary
for colloquial, conversational, informal English.
Only three examples of adverbials of manner with the "1y"
derivational suffix are found in all the stories (excluding the
frequent “really" found in several samples, both grades, both styles).
All three appear in the formal style of the third graders: "She went
to the ball happily," "the shoe fit just perfectly," and "they immed-
iately knew it was the wicked witch." No examples occurred in the
stories of the sixth graders.
The following lists contain other lexical selections that
illustrate the colloquial, casual diction used in the casual style
with the more formal diction of the formal style, the differences
occurring between styles rather than between grade levels:
7O
Third: casual Third: formal
1. Daddy 1. Dear Father
2. tickets 2. invitation
3. mad 3. disgusted
4. gir1 4. maiden
Sixth: casual Sixth: formal
1. guy 1. men
2. something to wear 2. a gown
3. went to look for 3. went searching for
4. walking 4. wandering
5. said 5. announced
At both grade levels there were a few instances in which the formal
style contained the less formal word choice. Two third graders said
"slipper" in the casual version but "shoe" in the formal, and one
said "man" in the casual but "guy" in the formal. One sixth grader
used “appears" in the casual but "comes" in the formal, and another
said "weeping" in the casual and "crying" in the formal.
In other syntactic phrases as well there were differences
between casual and formal styles, but few differences between grade
levels. The following lists contain phrases appearing in the formal
versions of both third and sixth graders. Phrases in parentheses
are the comparable phrases in the casual style, if such a phrase
occurred.
1.1019
1. He grew to like her very much.
2. She would visit them every springtime when the
blossoms come out.
3. When the clock struck twelve (at twelve o'clock)
4. She put a really pretty dress on her. (She
zapped something on her.)
71
5. They sensed something peculiar. (Something was
peculiar.)
6. A storm was brewing. (It started to rain and
storm.)
7. No one answered. (No one said anything.)
Sixth
She chanced to prick herself.
A prince happens along.
Beware of strangers. (Not to let strangers in.)
The person whom he married . . .
She fell into a deep sleep. (She fell asleep.)
U'I-wa—I
o o o o 0
These phrases are somewhat more formal than their casual counterparts
and in some instances add more suspense: "they sensed something
peculiar" instead of "something was peculiar," and "a storm was brew-
ing" instead of "it started to rain and storm." "She chanced to
prick herself" and "a prince happens along" are reflective of tradi-
tional fairy tale diction, and "No one answered" instead of "No one
said anything" suggests typical diction in passages of written dia-
logue. The phrase "whom he married" contains the only example of
this relative pronoun in the objective case in all of the stories
produced in this study.
While these phrases are more formal and appear in the formal
versions, their use does not necessarily indicate quality. In one
instance, at least, the less formal phrase "She zapped something on
her" has more life and force than its counterpart, "She put a really
pretty dress on her." These phrases do indicate, however, that
children as young as third graders are guided in lexical and syntactic
selection by the purpose or goal of the language task, at least to
some extent. Like the child in Bradford Arthur's informal study,
72
the children in my study produced an approximation of literary prose,
demonstrated, in part, by their lexical selections in the formal
oral style. Undoubtedly their ability to produce such prose resulted
from their passive assimilation of the prose they encountered in
stories they read or had read to them. This aspect of the study
offers exciting possibilities for further research.
Conclusions
These data seem to present a discernible pattern of increas-
ing syntactic complexity from casual to formal oral style at both
grade levels, especially for third graders. The evidence supports
my original hypothesis that children as early as the third grade are
gaining syntactic control of the styles in a linguistic repertoire.
This control manifests itself in the greater syntactic complexity
found in the formal oral style in all of the following categories:
increased length of T-Units and clauses; greater ratio of subordinate
clauses t0 T-Units; increased numbers of non-clause modifiers of
nouns, greater distribution of clauses in multi-clause T-Units;
decreased use of initial coordinating conjunctions; greater ratio
of passives and inversions per T-Unit; and more formal diction and
syntax.
My hypothesis that formal oral style would exhibit charac-
teristics comparable to written style needs to be reevaluated in
light of my data and its comparison to the data of Hunt and O'Donnell.
At the same time that my data show some distance between casual oral
and formal oral styles, my data compared with Hunt's and O'Donnell's
73
show, also, that there is some distance between formal oral and
written styles. There is perhaps a repertoire of stylistic alterna-
tives, beginning to develop as early as the third grade.
The assumption that sixth graders would exhibit more control
and greater syntactic complexity than third graders was not entirely
borne out by the data. Differences between grades were not as sub-
stantial as differences between styles, and the differences between
grades occurred in fewer of the syntactic variables studied.
A further analysis and comparison suggest that the develop-
ment of stylistic flexibility may occur in different channels for
children of different ages. Third graders appear to be developing
stylistic flexibility in oral language, as demonstrated by the
differences existing between their casual and formal oral styles,
while sixth graders, whose differences between casual and formal
oral styles are not so great and whose syntax is not so different
from third graders' as one might expect, may be developing language
control in written rather than in oral language. Such hypotheses
warrant further study and investigation.
It was assumed in this study that the goal of the formal
language event--the production of a written discourse--would be the
controlling factor in the syntactic complexity of the discourse
produced. We know, from evidence cited above, that children as
early as the third grade produce syntactic structures in written
discourse quite different from those in oral. My assumption was
that similar differences would appear between the casual and formal
oral language events as well. Many differences did occur; there
74
were increases in the complexity of the syntactic elements studied
from casual to formal oral. It appears, however, that the channel--
oral or written--has a greater control than the purpose or goal.
The children in many cases continued to use the discourse that was
more appropriate for oral language. The channel of discourse being
used at the moment had more effect than the ultimate goal of the
discourse.
But this is an unusual speech event; the goal in this study
does not have the same compelling nature as that in a normal con-
versation. The goal is less tangible. To some extent this speech
event was unreal because the goal was not immediate. Had there
been a real audience of other children to make the goal more immed-
iate, the results may have been quite different. Several implica-
tions for considering audience and goals in classroom speech and
writing events are discussed in Chapter VI.
FOOTNOTES--CHAPTER 111
1Frank O'Hare, Sentence Combining: Improving Student
Writing Without Formal Grammar Instruction (Urbana, Illinois:
NCTE, 1973), p. 22.
2Roy O'Donnell, William Griffin, and Raymond Norris,
Syntax of Elementary School Children: A Transformational Analysis
(Champaign: NCTE, 1967), p. 62.
3
Ibid., p. 81.
4Ibid., p. 98.
5Kellogg Hunt, Grammatical Structures Written at Three
Grade Levels (Champaign: NCTE, 1965), p. 106.
6
Ibid., p. 109.
71bid., p. 89.
8O'Donnell, et al., p. 60.
9
10Mike Pope, "The Syntax of Fourth Graders' Narrative and
Explanatory Speech," Research in the Teaching of English, 8 (Summer
1974 , 224.
11
Ibid., p. 78.
Ibid., p. 221.
'Zibid., p. 224.
13Hunt, p. 26.
14Ibid., p. 11.
15Ipid.
16O'Donnell, et al., p. 55.
75
CHAPTER IV
NARRATIVE STRUCTURE: STORY
Narrative Structure: A Schema
Most studies of child language acquisition have dealt with
syntactic and semantic analysis at the sentence level; little study
has been done on acquisition of units beyond sentence boundaries.
While analysis of sentences or smaller units is useful and insight-
ful, it does not contribute much to our understanding of how children
acquire control, either receptively or productively, of narrative
structures. Except for psychological studies of children's immediate
recall of stories, there is little research on children's discourse
or on the degree of control relative to age. Discourse analysis,
in general, is a relatively new field in language study, and what
has been done in this area has seen very limited application to the
discourse of children, with the notable exception ofiifew researchers
like Ervin-Tripp and Mitchell-Kernan who have studied children's
control of speech acts and speech events in various modes, and Keith
Kernan, who has applied William Labov's definition of narrative to
children's narrative. My study of the narrative structure of the
stories told by third and sixth graders develops a schema for the
description of narrative structure and discusses the differences
76
77
in narrative structure between the casual and formal oral styles
and the differences between grade levels. 1
While it is somewhat artificial to divide discourse analysis
into two separate categories, this division does expedite discussion
of narrative structure. For purposes of discussion in this study,
story in narrative structure--the internal relations of action and
character--and discourse--the set of external relations between
narrator and reader/1istener--will be discussed separately. It is
important, nevertheless, to keep in mind that these two dimensions
are inextricably bound together in the total narrative, as shall
be demonstrated further in Chapter V.
In an attempt to schematize the narrative structure of the
two fairy tales told in my study, I have adopted as the framework
elements of Chatman (1975), Labov (1972), and Stein and Glenn (1975).
My schema includes the two-dimensional view of discourse containing
story and discursive structure provided by Chatman, the six elements
of a full narrative provided by Labov (abstract, orientation, com-
plicating action, evaluation, result of resolution, and coda), and
the more fully-elaborated episode system and relationships between
episodes provided by Stein and Glenn. The following diagram repre-
sents the elements just listed, with the exception of the full
episode system which will be delineated separately for each story
later in this chapter:
78
Narrative
Story Discursive Structure
Orientation Complicating Abstract Evaluation Coda
Action
(Episode System)
Resolution
This diagram is not meant to suggest a linearity of narra-
tive structure; it is designed merely to show the two dimensions of
narrative discourse and to illustrate which dimension primarily
controls each of the six narrative elements described by Labov, a
point to be discussed later in this chapter and in Chapter V.
Such a framework provides a means of analyzing narrative
that is superior to traditional literary analysis in which the
relationship between the author/narrator and the reader/listener
is often ignored. Labov's framework on which much of the analysis
is based includes a discussion of the nature of the speech event in
which the narrative occurs, in which the speaker and listener are
engaged. Mary Louise Pratt (1977) refers to Labov's speech act
theory as important for literary analysis as well:
There are enormous advantages to talking about literature
in this way, too, for literary works, like all our communi—
cative activities, are context-dependent. Literature
itself is a speech context. And as with any utterance,
the way people produce and understand literary works depends
enormously on unspoken, culturally-shared knowledge of the
rules, conventions, and expectations that are in play when
language is used in that context. Just as a definition of
79
explaining, thanking, or persuading must include the
unspoken contextual information on which the participants
are relying, so must a definition of literature.1
To this end, I have adopted Labov's basic framework and modified it
to use as the basis of analysis in this study.
Story Schema: Orientation
and Episode System
Most story grammars, including those of Stein and Glenn,
present the rules which define the types of primary and higher order
categories and the relations between any two categories in a simple
story, much like the phrase-structure rules in a phrase-structure
constituent grammar. Stein and Glenn summarize these rules in
Figure 2 on page 80. Figure 3 on page 81 represents a tree showing
the ideal application of the rules in Figure 2.3
Each story being analyzed is divided into its individual
propositions, usually simple sentences, and matched to the discourse
structures diagrammed on page 81. Such a detailed analysis is
necessary for Stein and Glenn's purpose, which is to determine the
degree of story comprehension by their subjects after having heard
the story read to them just once--in other words, a check on their
immediate recall. A careful match of the subjects' story production
with that of the original story must be done. Obviously, for my
purposes, Stein and Glenn's schema is limited; it is highly behavior-
istic, representing a lock-step, stimulus-response model of story
production that discourages any creativity in story recall. It is
to be hoped that other superior schemas will emerge to describe the
process of story recall.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
80
Summary of Grammatical Rules
Story———> ALLOW (Setting, Episode System)
Setting————+ (State, Action)
Episode System AND [ 1
THEN Episodes, Episodes
CAUSE
Episode—aINITIATE (Initiating Event, Response)
Initiating Event————> (Natural Occurrence, Action, Internal Event)
Response————a'MOTIVATE (Internal Response, Plan Sequence)
Internal Response——-—> (Goal, Affect, Cognition)
Plan Sequence————a»INITIATE (Internal Plan, Plan Application)
Internal P1an———> (Cognition, Subgoal)
Plan Application————91RESULT (Attempt, Resolution)
Attempt———) (Action)
Resolution————9 INITIATE (Direct Consequence, Reaction)
Direct Consequence————9'(Event, End State)
Reaction-——-> (Affect, Cognition, Action)
Intra-category connectors:
AND: includes simultaneous or a temporal relation.
THEN: includes temporal but not direct causal relations.
CAUSE: includes temporal relations which are causal in nature.
Figure 2.--Summary of Grammatical Rules, Stein and Glenn.
81
.ccmpw use cwmum .mvomwam mpaswm w to me:pu=eum--.m mezmwu
wucmzcmmcou
yume_o
cowgummmllmpï¬ï¬ï¬
/ \
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\ 5:
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III/1111: \\\\\ mmcoammm
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\\\\\ ucm>m
mcoAMNMIIIIIWpowuwcmnlium:_um_uwcH
883“ A221 9.36%
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xeoum
82
In the present study no such detailed matching of sentence
to sentence can be done because there is no detailed original story
to use as the base. Numerous versions of both fairy tales exist,
and this study is not so much concerned with story comprehension as
it is with the overall syntactic and narrative structure of the
individual versions of the tales told by the children in the study.
Of course, these retellings reflect the students' previously inter—
nalized discourse structure of these stories, rather than their
immediate recall of details. For this reason the analysis of the
episode systems in both stories is much more general in nature,
although I am using the basic framework of Stein and Glenn's episode
system.
Orientation
Stein and Glenn define orientation, or setting, as the
beginning part of the story which introduces the main character(s)
and describes the social, physical, or temporal context in which
the rest of the story occurs. Their definition states that the type
of information contained in the setting is basically stative and
refers to long-term or habitual states of characters or locations.
An activity of a character may be considered part of the setting
only if it is habitual. The setting, according to Stein and Glenn,
creates the necessary conditions for the story to occur but does not
directly cause the subsequent actions and events.4
The relationship that exists between the setting and the
series of episodes that follow depends upon the individual narrative:
83
Some stories simply introduce the character, give a few
descriptive statements and then proceed to the episode
system. In these stories the setting does not tell you
anything about the character's past or present behavior
and does not give any clue or advanced information about
the events to occur in the remainder of the story. How-
ever, in many children's stories, especially those adapted
for young readers, the setting often is more directly
related to the subsequent occurrences in the remainder of
the story. For example, many settings relate the type of
internal desire the character has expressed over a long
period of time. The remainder of the story often details
just how this internal state changed or influenced a
character's subsequent behavior.5
Labov defines orientation as the section of the narrative
that identifies the time, place, persons, and situations.6 Both
studies suggest that the setting is often found at the beginning
of the narrative, but they also stress that much of the material is
found throughout the narrative as scenes shift and change. Labov
emphasizes the importance of the orientation in narrative develop-
ment because it can set the stage for the subsequent polarization
of forces: protagonist vs. antagonist, good vs. evil.
Episode System
While Labov says little about the complicating action in
narrative except in terms of the evaluation of the narrative, Stein
and Glenn spend considerable time discussing and illustrating their
conception of the episode system, as they refer to the complicating
action. They define episode as:
. the primary higher order unit of a story . . . that
consists of an entire behavioral sequence. It includes
the external and/or internal events which influence a char-
acter, the character's internal response (goals, cognitive
plans) to these events, the character's external response
84
to his goals, and the consequence resulting from his
overt responses. Inherent in this sequence is a causal
chain of events beginning with an initiating event and
ending with a resolution.
1 Because a story usually consists of more than one episode,
the episodes must be linked. To reiterate, Stein and Glenn see three
basic relationships, the first two of which are temporal and the
third, causal: (1) an AND_relationship indicating simultaneous
activity or temporally overlapping states; (2) a THEN relationship
indicating temporal order; and (3) a CAUS§_relationship indicating
a direct causal connection between the two episodes. There are
obviously other types of relationships existing between episodes,
which Stein and Glenn do not mention, possibly because such rela-
tionships are more likely to exist in more complex narratives than
those used in their studies: parallel episodes, ironic relation-
ships between episodes, episodes characterizing participants in
other episodes, to name a few. The episodes in the fairy tales
studied here generally fit into the relationships categorized by
Stein and Glenn.
Applebee, in his study of children's narratives, poses a
central question in the discussion of the relationships between
episodes: Are the narratives more likely to be unfocused chain
narratives in which events are loosely connected without a focus
or center; focused chain narratives in which events are linked
together, usually by one main character, as in a picaresque story;
or true narratives in which the incidents are linked both by
centering and chaining, where each incident is developed logically
85
out of the previous one? In other words, how close are the nar-
ratives of the third and sixth graders to the true narratives des-
cribed-by Applebee? (For the present discussion of story, I am not
considering Labov's definition of a fully-formed narrative as having
evaluation, although it will be central to my discussion of narrative
discursive structure in Chapter V.)
The episode system in the data collected for this study will
be analyzed on the basis of the essential elements in each episode;
the adequacy of the motivation of the events in the episodes; the
deve10pment of characterization, including types of responses, both
internal and external; the use of details in the episodes; and the
relationships between episodes in terms of the appropriate choice
of linkages establishing logical, coherent development.
Episode System: Cinderella
The basic story structure of Cinderella in an idealized
form contains an orientation and five episodes within the episode
system. The diagram on page 86 illustrates the five episodes and
the relationships existing between them. The setting contains the
following elements:
1. Cinderella lives with her cruel stepmother and
stepsisters.
2. She is made to do all the work while her step-
sisters are pampered.
86
Story
Setting Episode System
El
\
\
CAUSE
\
t2
\
\
CAUSE
\
\
E3---THEN---E4
\
\
CAUSE
\
\
E5
87
The essential elements of Episode 1 are:
1.
«IE-(ADM
The prince announces a ball to which everyone is
invited.
Cinderella wants to go, but her stepmother refuses
to let her.
While her stepsisters get ready to go to the ball,
Cinderella must stay home and do all the work.
After everyone leaves for the ball, Cinderella
begins to cry.
The essential elements of Episode 2 are:
1.
2.
Cinderella's fairy godmother comes to find out why
Cinderella is crying.
Her fairy godmother changes a pumpkin into a coach,
mice into horses, and gives Cinderella a beautiful
dress to wear and a pair of glass slippers so that
she can go to the ball.
She tells Cinderella that she must be home by
midnight.
The essential elements of Episode 3 are:
1.
2.
3.
Cinderella rides to the ball.
No one recognizes her at the ball.
She dances with everyone, including the prince.
The essential elements of Episode 4 are:
1.
2.
The prince falls in love with Cinderella and
wants to marry her.
But when Cinderella hears the clock strike twelve,
she rushes out of the ballroom and loses one of
her glass slippers.
When she gets home she is changed into her old
self.
The essential elements of Episode 5 are:
1.
2.
3.
The prince chases Cinderella and finds her glass
slipper.
He begins searching the next day throughout the
kingdom for the owner of the glass slipper.
He comes to Cinderella's house and tries the
slipper on the stepmother and stepsisters first.
It doesn't fit.
He next tries it on Cinderella and it fits, must
to everyone's surprise.
He asks her to marry him, and they live happily
ever after.
88
The first episode is causally related to the second:
Cinderella's unhappiness about being unable to go to the ball is
both a necessary and a sufficient reason for the fairy godmother to
come. Similarly, the second episode causes the third: Cinderella's
fairy godmother causes Cinderella to go to the ball. A temporal rela-
tionship exists between the third and fourth episodes: Cinderella's
going to the ball is a necessary but not a sufficient cause for the
prince to dance with her and fall in love. The fourth and fifth
episodes, again, are related causally: the prince's search of the
kingdom for Cinderella is caused by his having fallen in love with
her at the ball and by her disappearance at midnight.
The resolution in Stein and Glenn's schema is found at the
end of every episode, i.e., the initiating action of every episode
ends in either the attainment or the non-attainment of the goal.
Labov simply suggests that the resolution is the termination or
final outcome of the series of events in the complicating action.
Labov's view of resolution is more applicable to the present study,
so in this analysis the resolution is described as occurring at the
end of the fifth episode when the prince finds Cinderella and asks
her to marry him.
Episode System: Snow White
and the Seven Dwarfs
The basic structure of Snow White consists of the orienta-
tion and five episodes within the episode system, illustrated in
the diagram on page 89. The orientation contains the following
elements (continued on page 90):
89
Story
Setting Episode System
I
1
E1
A
\
\
onus
\
£2
\\
\ \\
\ \
\
CAUSE CAUSE
\‘ \
E3---AND--:E4---THEN---E5
A A A
90
1. Snow White lives with her stepmother, the queen, who
is very vain.
2. Whenever the queen asks her magic mirror who is th
fairest in the land, it answers that she is.
The essential elements of Episode 1 are:
1. One day when Snow White's stepmother asks her mirror
who is the fairest, it replies that Snow White is
the'fairest.
The queen becomes very angry.
She orders one of her guards to take Snow White out
into the woods and kill her.
(JON
The essential elements of Episode 2 are:
l. The guard takes Snow White into the woods.
2. But because he can't bring himself to kill her,
he commands her to flee.
3. As proof of Snow White's death, he takes the heart
of a deer back to the queen.
The essential elements of Episode 3 are:
1. Snow White flees and comes to the house of the
Seven Dwarfs.
Finding no one home, she enters, cleans it up,
and falls asleep.
When the dwarfs find her there, she tells them her
plight and they agree to keep her there.
When they go to work the next morning, they warn her
not to let any strangers in.
#00“)
The essential elements of Episode 4 are:
1. Meanwhile, when the queen asks her mirror again who
is the fairest, it replies that Snow White is, that she
is still alive, living at the home of the seven dwarfs.
2. The queen disguises herself as an old woman.
3. She takes a poisoned apple to Snow White.
4. Unsuspecting, Snow White lets her in, takes a bite of
the apple, and collapses.
The essential elements of Episode 5 are:
1. The dwarfs come back, find Snow White, and put her in a
coffin in the woods.
2. A prince comes along, sees her lying there, and kisses
her.
3. She comes back to life and rides off with the prince
to live happily ever after.
91
There is a causal relationship between episodes one and
two and between two and three: the queen's command to her guard to
kill Snow White forces him to take her into the woods, presumably
to kill her; his aversion to doing so causes her to flee to the
safety of the seven dwarfs' house. An AND relationships exists
between episodes three and four: the two episodes happen simul-
taneously. While Snow White is telling the dwarfs about her plight,
the queen is discovering that Snow White is still alive. But a
complexity exists in this part of the episode system that is not
present in Cinderella. While episodes three and four occur simul-
taneously, episode four is also caused by episode two: the fact
that Snow White escapes in episode 2 causes the queen in episode
four to disguise herself and to find Snow White in order to kill
her herself. Episodes four and five are related temporally: after
Snow White collapses, the dwarfs come back and discover what has
happened. The resolution occurs at the end of the episode when
the price comes along, kisses Snow White, and brings her back to
1ife.
Analysis of Stories: Orientations
Orientations are important, according to Labov and to Stein
and Glenn, because they provide a detailed picture of the situation
out of which the ensuing conflict will develop, particularly in
fairy tales. Not only must a reference be made to the essential
character(s) in the story, but if the character's personality,
92
internal responses and cognitions are important to the development
of the plot, they must be specified. I
All but two third and sixth graders made a reference to
Cinderella by name, although in the formal version of two third
graders, "girl†was used, and in the casual version "girl" and â€she"
were used once each. Two sixth graders did not refer to Cinderella
by name in the orientation, one in the casual version and one in
the formal.
In the Snow White stories all but three third and sixth
graders refer to Snow White by name; the three who do not include
two third graders in their first versions who omit any mention of
Snow White in the orientation, and one of these two also omits any
such reference in the formal version. One sixth grader in both
styles makes no mention of Snow White in the orientation.
The most interesting aspect of the orientations is the rela-
tionships that are established between the protagonists (Cinderella
and Snow White) and the antagonists (the stepmother/stepsisters and
the queen). In Cinderella, most of the third and sixth graders
mention either the stepmother or the stepsisters or both in both
the casual and the formal styles, and most make a reference to
Cinderella's being a maid or slave in her stepmother's house. Some
describe the stepmother as being mean to Cinderella, making her do
all the work.
A slight increase in the use of details occurs in the
orientation from casual to formal styles in a few of the third and
sixth graders' stories, and in some cases the change is dramatic:
Third:
Sixth:
93
Casual
Cinderella was a girl and
she was a slave.
Cinderella had a stepmother
and two stepsisters, and
her stepmother made her
work and didn't let her
do anything. She always
did the work and she had
to sleep in the attic and
everything.
Formal
Once upon a time there was this
girl who was a maid for her
three stepsisters and her step-
mother. And she lived with her.
Once upon a time there was this
girl named Cinderella, and she
lived with her stepmother and
two stepsisters. And her step-
mother and stepsisters made her
do all the work, and cleaning
and cooking and everything, and
sewing. And she had to sleep
in the attic.
Greater differences appear between the third graders and the
sixth graders, however. Generally, the sixth graders develop the
relationship between the stepmother/sisters and Cinderella more fully
than the third graders do.
However, this development is not always
in the orientation; often it occurs in the first episode when the
stepmother/sisters are getting ready to go to the ball.
While the relationship between Cinderella and her stepmother/
sisters can be explained on the basis of dislike or on the basis of
the stereotyped stepmother/stepdaughter relationship, the relation-
ship between Snow White and the queen is more complex:
the vain
queen ostensibly becomes jealous of Snow White's beauty, and unless
this fact is made explicit, the queen's attempt on Snow White's life
remains by and large unmotivated.
In general, the third graders' orientations in both styles
did little to develop the conflict between the queen and Snow White.
Most did mention the queen's dislike of Snow White but did not refer
to any jealousy.
Likewise, only one third grader mentioned the
94
magic mirror in the orientation, and that was in the formal style.
Three mentioned the mirror in the first episode of both versions,
but two did not mention it at all in the entire story of either
version. While three third graders did add explanatory details to
their orientations in moving from casual to formal styles, only one
strengthened the conflict between the queen and Snow White in her
formal version by referring to the queen's jealousy. Overall, the
third graders' casual and formal orientations seemed to reflect a
grasp of the fact that some setting had to be given, but they failed
to establish the basic conflict very precisely. Third graders
obviously have control of the orientation in narrative structure,
demonstrated by the Cinderella stories, but it appears that the
complexity of the relationship between Snow White and the queen
may be responsible for their lack of explanatory details in the
orientations of this narrative. (A more complete discussion of
motivation occurs further on in this chapter.)
The sixth graders, on the other hand, presented the initial
situation more fully than the third graders even in their casual
versions. Only one sixth grader had a limited orientation in both
versions. In two other cases there was a definite elaboration
from casual to formal. Like the Cinderella stories, the Snow White
tales illustrate more complete, detailed orientations by sixth
graders, with some change from casual to formal. The following
excerpts, an informal and formal from each grade level, illustrate:
Third:
Sixth:
95
Casual
Once upon a time there was
a beautiful princess named
Snow White, and the queen,
her mother, she was very
wicked and she didn't like
Snow White.
A long, long time ago a
queen had a baby and named
it Snow White. And then
that queen died and the
king married another queen
and this queen was wicked
and everything. And every
morning the wicked queen
would go to her mirror and
ask who was the fairest of
all. And the mirror would
say, "You are the fairest
of all," and all this.
Formal
Once upon a time there was a
princess named Snow White.
She had a mother. Her mother
was queen and she was a wicked
one. She wanted to get rid of
Snow White.
Once upon a time there was a
queen, and she was sitting at
her window sewing one day, and
she chanced to prick herself,
and a few drops of blood fell
onto the snow, and she said
that her child's hair would be
as dark as the window pane, and
her lips would be as red as
blood, and she would call her
Snow White. And so then she
had this child, and then she
died. And then the king mar-
ried another lady, and this
lady was kind of a witch, and
every morning she'd go to her
mirror and say, "Mirror, mirror,
on the wall, Who's the fairest
of them all?"
The origin of Snow White's name included in the formal
verion of the sixth grader quoted above appears in two other Snow
White stories, in the casual and formal versions of one other sixth
grader.
stories.
This information appears in none of the third graders'
The significant change from the third graders' versions to
the sixth graders' is much more obvious in the Snow White stories
than in Cinderella.
One possible explanation is that the need for
laying the groundwork for what happens to Snow White is much more
important than for Cinderella:
what happens to Cinderella is in_
spite of her antagonists, not directly because of them, as in Snow
96
White's case. Motivation is much more crucial in Snow White. Per-
haps sixth graders, more than third graders, understand the need for
motivation. Motivation is discussed more extensively later in this
chapter with reference to the episodes and the coherent development
of events within the episodes.
In a few cases, material that one would expect to find in the
orientation establishing the relationship between the protagonist and
the antagonist is developed instead in the first episode. Five third
graders and four sixth graders, in both versions, developed the con—
flict between Cinderella and her stepmother/sisters when Cinderella
is not allowed to go to the ball and must stay home to do all the
work. A similar situation occurs in some of the Snow White stories
when the queen suddenly discovers that she is no longer the fairest.
The following excerpt from a sixth grader's formal version shows the
limited orientation and the further development of the conflict in
the first episode:
Once upon a time there was three stepsisters with Cinderella,
and they were going to the ball, and then they all announced,
"Let's go to the ball, let's go to the ball;'and Cinderella
was talking about how she wanted to go to the ball. 50 they
said, "You funny thing." And she said, "I'm not funny-
looking." And they started to laugh at her, and they said,
"Come here and help me zip up this dress. Come here, come
help me do this. Wash them floors. You're going to stay
here and do the chores.“
Analysis of Stories: Episode System
Episodes
Few third graders or sixth graders, in either version of
Cinderella, included all the essential elements of the episodes.
97
Since most of the essential elements are either motivating actions
or results of such actions, omission of any of the elements usually
results in incomplete, somewhat unmotivated episodes or portions of
episodes, a lack of suspense and conflict, and a resolution with
less impact. Table 9 indicates, for each scene represented, the
number of third and sixth graders for each style that included the
particular action. The total number of third graders represented
is eight, and the number of sixth graders is seven.
Occasionally a third or sixth grader omitted one of the
actions in the episodes such as Cinderella's crying, or the use of
magic to change rags into beautiful clothes, etc., or the fairy
godmother's warning to be home by midnight, or dancing with the
prince. These omissions were fairly evenly distributed among the
students at each grade level, between grade levels, and between
casual and formal styles. But the essential elements for plot
development were included by most students: the announcement of
the ball, the coming of the fairy godmother, Cinderella's going to
the ball, her running out and losing her glass slipper, and her
being able to fit into the glass slipper during the prince's search.
It appears that the major events of the narrative, including the
resolution at the end, occur virtually in all the stories.
In contrast, very few third or sixth graders included two
of the actions in either version: Cinderella's dancing at the ball
unrecognized and being changed back to her former self after the
ball, both of which are relatively unimportant for plot development.
98
TABLE 9.--Number of Students Including Key Scenes--Cinderella.
Scenes
Grade Level 3
(N-B)
Grade Level 6
.(N=7)
II.
III.
IV.
Announcement of ball
Casual
Formal
Cinderella not allowed to 90
Casual
Formal
Cinderella must stay and work
Casual '
Formal
Cinderella cries
Casual
Formal
Fairy godmother comes
Casual
Formal
Changes horses, pumpkin, clothes
Casual
Formal
Warning to be home by midnight
Casual
Formal
Cinderella goes to the ball
Casual
Formal
No one recognizes her
Casual
Formal
Dances with the prince
Casual
Formal
Prince falls in love with Cinderella
Casual
Formal
Hears the clock strike twelve; leaves
Casual
Formal
Runs out and loses slipper
Casual
Formal
Is changed back to her old self
Casual
Formal
Prince chases her and finds slipper
Casual
Formal
Searches the kingdom for owner
Casual
Formal
Tries slipper on stepmother/sisters
Casual
Formal
Tries it on Cinderella and it fits
Casual
Formal
They get married
Casual
Formal
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99
The most interesting omissions were those involving scenes
more crucial to plot development and development of conflict: the
prince falling in love with Cinderella, his finding the glass slipper,
and the stepsisters trying on the slipper. Few differences exist
between casual and formal styles, except among third graders who
increased their reference to the prince finding the slipper from
five to seven, and the stepsisters trying on the slipper from six to
eight. It is interesting that the increase was found only among
third graders; one would expect the same change among sixth graders
from casual to formal, but none occurred. It is possible that the
sixth graders assumed this information to be implicit in their
stories, and did not feel compelled to make it explicit.
More sixth graders than third graders included the two
events concerning the prince falling in love with Cinderella and
his finding the glass slipper, particularly in the casual style.
However, in the last episode, of the third graders, five in the
casual and seven in the formal referred to the stepsisters trying
on the glass slipper, and of the sixth graders, only two in each
style included the scene. This is an interesting phenomenon because
the inclusion of this element helps to develop the conflict and to
heighten the impact of the resolution: the rise of Cinderella and
the fall of the stepmother/sisters. It is somewhat surprising that
the third graders carried the development further than did the sixth
graders, even though the inclusion of this detail is not necessary
for the resolution to occur. Perhaps the sixth graders understand
this.
100
As in Cinderella, few third graders or sixth graders in
either version included all the elements of every episode in Snow
White. Table 10 illustrates the actions in the episodes that the
third and sixth graders included in their stories. The total
number of third graders is 6, and the number of sixth graders is 5.
Most sixth graders and a few third graders omitted the
scene where the guard substitutes a deer's heart to show the queen,
and only two third graders included the scene of Snow White's
telling the dwarfs about her plight. Both of these scenes are
relatively unimportant to the development of the plot. Key ele-
ments to plot development, however, are included by almost all
third and sixth graders in both styles: the queen's ordering Snow
White to be killed, the queen's taking a poisoned apple to Snow
White, Snow White's collapse, and the prince's bringing her back
to life.
On the other hand, a few at both grade levels omitted any
explicit reference to the queen finding out that Snow White was
still alive, living with the dwarfs. She simply showed up at Snow
White's door one day with a poisoned apple. And two third graders
in their casual versions and one in her formal failed to mention
that the apple was poisoned, as did one sixth grader.
Major omissions that showed differences between styles or
between grade levels were the queen's use of the magic mirror, her
jealousy of Snow White, and the dwarfs' warning to Snow White to
beware of strangers. Only one third grader in the casual style
and three in the formal referred to the mirror, in contrast to
101
TABLE lO.--Number of Students Including Key Scenes--Snow White.
Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
Scenes (N - 6) (N - 5)
I. 1. Mirror tells queen that SW is fairest
Casual
Formal
2. Queen becomes jealous and angry
Casual
Formal
3. Queen orders SW killed
Casual
Formal
_a_o 93—;
0'01 #3 bb
010'!
II. 1. Guard can't kill SW so commands her to flee
Casual
Formal
2. Kills a deer instead to show heart to queen
Casual
Formal
«bu 01-5
0101
N...-
111. 1. SW goes to house of Seven Dwarfs
Casual
Formal
2. She cleans and then falls asleep
Casual
Formal
3. Dwarfs find her and she tells her tale
Casual
Formal
4. They warn her not to let strangers in
Casual
Forman
No NN && 010'!
bus) tbb (AN #01
IV. 1. Queen finds out SW is still alive
Casual
Formal
2. Queen disguises herself
Casual
Formal
3. Takes poisoned apple to SW
Casual
Formal
4. SW takes it and collapses
Casual
Formal
05m 010‘ #95 4:01
0101 0101 010'! MN
V. l. Dwarfs find SW and put her in casket
Casual
Formal
2. Prince finds her and kisses her
Casual
Formal
3. SW comes back to life and rides off w/ prince
Casual
Formal
0101 090‘ 010'!
03% 010! 010'!
102
four sixth graders in both styles. References to the queen's
jealousy occurred in only one third grader's versions, in contrast
to the references of four sixth graders' stories in both versions.
The reference to the dwarfs' warning to Snow White increased for
both grade levels from casual to formal styles, although the sixth
graders overall had a higher incidence of this scene in their
stories. Quite possibly the sixth graders, more than the third
graders, sensed the dramatic impact of this scene and consequently
included it more frequently.
Motivation
It is clear from the discussion of the essential elements
in the episodes that certain problems arise in plot development
and dramatic impact when those essential elements are missing: if
Cinderella is not commanded by her fairy godmother to return by
midnight, why does she run out when she hears the clock strike
twelve--why the haste? If the prince just dances with Cinderella
without any mention of his falling in love with her, why the chase
scene, and why the impetus to find the owner of the glass slipper?
How does the wicked queen know where Snow White is now staying?
And if the apple isn't poisoned, why does Snow White collapse?
Some of the events and outcomes are weakly motivated and the
resolutions less than dramatic. Even when the stepsisters are
described as trying on the glass slipper, references to their
jealousy are infrequent. And the entire conflict between Snow
White and the queen in most of the versions is attributed to the
103
queen's dislike of Snow White; in only a few cases, primarily among
sixth graders, are the queen's vanity and her subsequent envy of
Snow White's beauty made explicit.
How can we account f0r such obvious gaps in motivation?
One might assume, of course, that third and sixth graders simply
are not sufficiently aware, consciously or unconsciously, of nar-
rative development, that their understanding of causal relationships
is not fully developed. Studies done on the recall of stories by
children, however, suggest that even very young children are capable
of dealing with causal relationships. Stein and Glenn's study of
first and fifth graders showed that the types of category informa-
tion most frequently recalled were major settings, direct conse-
quences, and initiating events, all highly consistent across stories
and grade level.8 Handler and Johnson's study of first and fourth
graders and adults showed similar results. Adults recalled more
information, but even the younger students were sensitive to the
structure of stories and organized retrieval in a fashion similar
to adults. The main difference was that children seemed to place
greater weight on outcomes than on attempts, and they often did
not recall reactions. Mandler and Johnson go on to state:
We believe the lack of recall does not primarily reflect a
lack of comprehension. Rather the schemata which young
children use to organize their recall emphasize the out-
comes of action sequences rather than the actions themselves
or the internal events motivating them.9
According to this study, then, the outcomes of actions rather than
the motivations for the actions or the actions themselves take
precedence. It is a matter of emphasis rather than a lack of
104
comprehension. Cinderella rushing out at midnight, the prince
chasing her, Snow White being given a poisoned apple, and her»
collapse are all outcomes of other actions or motivations; those
motivations remaining unspecified may be a reflection of the
emphasis given to stories in story-recall by children rather than
a conceptual lack.
Some evidence exists in the stories themselves that these
third graders and sixth graders comprehended the motivational
structure of the narratives. For example, in three Cinderella
tales, all in the formal style, one third grader and two sixth
graders used the anaphoric "the," in "the prince was chasing her"
and "the prince found it," implying that an earlier reference to
the prince was intended, even though no earlier references were
actually made. In another case, a sixth grader, in her casual
version, said about Cinderella, "She had to be back or she would
be ugly again" even though there was no previous reference to the
fairy godmother having changed her from an ugly to a beautiful girl
in the first place. In the casual version of a third grader's
Snow White, there is no orientation; Snow White is simply walking
through the woods looking for somewhere to go. It isn't until much
later in the narrative that she refers to the queen, in a scene that
follows Snow White at the house of the seven dwarfs: "The queen had
found out about this" implies an earlier reference even though there
was none. A sixth grader in her casual version of Snow White says
about the queen and the poisoned apple: "Then she came as an old
lady with that apple," without any previous or subsequent reference
105
to its having been poisoned. The story teller obviously assumes
this knowledge on the part of the listener. All of these examples
suggest that, at least for these individuals, the gaps in the moti-
vation of actions or in the events themselves are attributable, not
to any lack of knowledge of the underlying structure of the story,
but to their simply not realizing them in the surface telling of
the story.
Of particular interest in Snow White is the lack of explicit
motivation for the queen's desire to kill Snow White. To reiterate,
third graders, especially, made no mention of jealousy in either of
their versions, but simply said the queen hated Snow White, and only
a few implied that the queen was vain by referring to her magic
mirror. One must consider the possibility that children of this
age (8) are unable to imagine jealousy as a motive for a parent:
how could the queen possibly be jealous of her own daughter's
beauty? At the same time, in some versions of the tale, the queen
is Snow White's stepmother and as such the queen is killing a
potential rival for the affections of the father/husband, a rival
who does not enjoy the protection of blood relationship. Children
may be aware, unconsciously, of this motivation and may not remember
the spurious false reason, i.e., the envy of Snow White's beauty.
Still another possibility is that the step-relationship is not as
clearly emphasized in Snow White as it is in Cinderella, so it is
not as easily remembered. At the same time it is possible that
these examples illustrate the Piagetian idea of the evolving ability
106
to abstract from oneself to the thoughts and needs of a reader, a
point to be discussed later in this chapter.
The lack of motivation may lie in the nature of the fairy
tale itself. V. Propp, speaking of the motivations of villains in
Morphology of the Folktale, says that motivations in folktales
"belong to the most inconstant and unstable elements of the tale.
. . There is reason to think that motivations formulated in words
"10 The cruelty of Cinderella's
are alien to the tale on the whole.
villainous stepmother is often unmotivated in the stories told by
my students: some state her dislike for Cinderella, and the rest
merely state that she is wicked, cruel, or mean, without stating
an explicit motive. Of course, the motive could be implicit--
Cinderella is a stepdaughter and stepsister--nothing more need be
said. Certainly Snow White's villainous queen needs no explicit
motivation either, if Propp is correct.
Characterization
Story-tellers can provide for motivation by developing
characters as extensively as possible. Although characters in
fairy tales are generally one-dimensional and have limited possi-
bilities for development, a story-teller can, nevertheless,
delineate the character by recording a character's external or
internal responses; internal responses include cognitions, goals,
and emotions.]] Recording these responses often constitutes eval-
uation of the narrative, in Labov's terms.
107
A number of the Cinderella tales of both third and sixth
graders included statements about the characters' internal responses.
The cognitions, few in number, were primarily introduced by phrases
like: "she knew that . . ." or "she almost forgot . . ." or "she
thought. . . ." The most interesting in the Cinderella tales,
though, were those which reflected the thinking of the other char-
acters in the story, especially the antagonists, rather than
Cinderella herself. The following two are from the formal styles
of two third graders, both depicting the state of mind of the
stepmother/sisters: "the stepmother and stepsisters were very
confused because they knew she (Cinderella) couldn't have went to
the dance"; "They tried everybody in it except for Cinderella, so
he finally tried her and it fit her and everybody was surprised."
One sixth grader, in both styles, says about the stepsisters: "and
her stepsisters was wondering who was that pretty girl who was
dancing in there," "and her stepsisters was wondering who was she
(at the dance)." All four examples, besides adding interesting
details, help to develop the conflict between the stepsisters and
Cinderella. It is important to note that three of the four appear
in the formal versions.
The goal statements--desires or intentions-~appear to be
fairly evenly distributed between casual and formal styles, but
sixth graders used twice as many as third graders in both styles.
The statements most commonly take the form of stating or implying
Cinderella's wanting to go to the ball.
108
The affective responses are found in greater numbers in
the formal versions of the sixth graders than in their casual
versions or than in either of the third graders' versions. The
following examples illustrate:
She was feeling really bad. (third, casual)
Cinderella got excited because . . . (third, casual)
She went to the ball happily. (third, formal)
She wanted to go so bad. (sixth, formal)
The prince really liked her. (sixth, formal)
He loved her a lot. (sixth, formal)
Cinderella was really happy. (sixth, formal)
Nmmth-d
In Snow White the cognitions were evenly distributed between
casual and formal for the sixth graders, but the third graders' use
increased substantially from casual to formal. Most took the form
of "she knew that . . ." or "she thought . . ." But the less typi-
cal words describing the particular cognition were all in the formal
styles of the third graders: one said, "Snow White imagined a lot
of things happening"; two others used the word "remembered," and
one, in describing the dwarfs' coming home, said, "They peppeg_
something peculiar."
The goal statements were evenly distributed between grade
levels and between styles in the Snow White stories, most taking
the form of the queen wanting to kill Snow White, and the guard
not wanting to kill her.
The affective responses occurred with greater frequency
among third graders in both casual and formal styles. Many were
used with reference to Snow White's being scared, the dwarfs' being
sad, the queen's not liking Snow White, and her getting angry over
the fact of Snow White's beauty.
109
While sixth graders in Cinderella appear to develop char-
acterization more extensively through the use of internal responses
than third graders, the reverse is true in Snow White. But even if
there were greater consistency between grade levels in these stories,
one must be careful about suggesting that an increase in the quantity
of internal responses always represents a qualitative improvement.
Comments on a character's internal responses generally have the
effect of clarifying and sharpening characterization and events,
but Stein and Glenn suggest that omissions of internal responses
are common and can indicate that a character's feelings or thoughts
are implicit either from the initiating event which has occurred
12 The implication is that
or from the behavior that follows.
external events and actions can be as insightful into a character's
inner thoughts and feelings as are descriptions of those feelings
themselves.
Labov's view of narrative strongly supports the use of
objectivity rather than descriptions of feelings as a means of
making a point or developing dramatic conflict. The impact of a
good narrative is derived more from objectivity than from subjec—
tivity: external actions rather than internal responses give the
narrative its force. The internal responses of Stein and Glenn
are referred to by Labov as external evaluations. He discusses the
importance of the evaluation of the narrative--the means used by
the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative--in terms of
the need for the narrator to ward off a "So what?" response to the
story. The narrator must clearly make the narrative reportable,
110
interesting, and worth the listener's time. There are many ways
in which a narrative can be evaluted, he says. "Evaluation devices
say to us: this was terrifying, dangerous, weird, wild, crazy; or
amusing, hilarious, wonderful; more generally, that is was strange,
uncommon, or unusual-—that is, worth reporting. It was not ordinary,
plain, humdrum, everyday, or run-of-the-mill."13
To evaluate the narrative, the narrator can stop the nar-
rative, turn to the listener, and tell him what the point is--a kind
of external evaluation: "it was a terrifying experience" or "it
really scared me." Here the speaker steps out of the bounds of the
narrative itself to tell what the character or the narrator is
thinking or feeling, very similar to the internal responses, as
Stein and Glenn refer to them, illustrated above in Cinderella and
Snow White.
A different method of evaluation, one that allows the nar-
rative itself to convey the information, is by embedding the evalu-
ation within the narrative. The narrator can either attribute a
statement to himself as occurring at the moment rather than address-
ing it to the listener outside of the narrative: "I just closed my
eyes and said, 'This is it'"; or he can quote himself as addressing
someone else. A third option for embedding the evaluation in the
narrative is by introducing a third person who evaluates the pro-
tagonist's or the antagonist's actions for the narrator. This type
of embedding is used primarily in personal rather than in vicarious
narratives, and, as such, did not occur in the narratives in my
study.
111
This study did, however, find story-tellers evaluating by
telling what people did rather than what they thought, a type of
evaluation that more closely approaches the objectivity in narrative
transmission that Labov discusses. Instead of the story-teller say-
ing that a character was scared, a more effectively dramatic form
would be to say that he was shaking like a leaf. Feelings and
thoughts are made explicit through observable actions.
Examples of this kind of embedded evaluation occurred in
both tales, in both casual and formal styles, and by both third and
sixth graders, with no discernible differences in frequency in any
of these categories. A number of third and sixth graders do not
describe Cinderella as being unhappy, but they show her feelings by
her crying. Few actually describe the stepmother/sisters' feelings
of jealousy, but some describe their actions that demonstrate
jealousy. One of the best examples is from the formal version of
a sixth grader, who describes the contempt the stepsisters have for
Cinderella in this way:
And then they all announced, "Let's go to the ball, let's
go to the ball." And Cinderella was talking about how she
wanted to go to the ball. So they said, "You funny thing."
And she said, "I'm not funny-looking." And they started
laughing at her, and they said, "Come here and help me zip
up this dress. Come here, come help me do this. Wash them
floors. You're going to stay here and do the chores."
No reference to their internal responses is necessary; their comments
and actions tell the story. A third grader, in her formal verions of
Cinderella, describes the stepmother's jealousy during the shoe-
fitting scene in this way:
112
The next day the king said to go around with the glass
slipper trying it on the women's feet. So they kept on
going, and then the last house was Cinderella's. And
then the stepsisters and the mother tried it on. The
stepmother locked her up. The little mice gone and got
the key and got her out just in time. And then the man
almost left and then she said, "Wait. Can I try on the
glass slipper?" And they said, "Yes." And then the old
stepmother tripped her and broke the glass slipper. Then
she said, "Wait. I got the other one." She pulled it
out of her little pocket and there it was.
In Snow White the dwarfs are sometimes described as crying,
with no explicit reference being made to their grieving over Snow
White's apparent death. A few students refer to the wicked queen
laughing (with glee) at the effect of the poisoned apple, with no
explicit reference to the queen's internal response.
A number of students refer explicitly to the internal
response of the character and then illustrate it with the actions
of the character. The stepmother is often described as not liking
Cinderella, along with what this state of mind entails: Cinderella
is made to do all the hard work like scrubbing the floors, and she
has to sleep in the attic. A good example of the use of both
internal and external responses is found in the following excerpt
from a sixth grader's formal version of Snow White:
So he took Snow White into the woods, and she was picking
flowers and being as gay as could be in the woods. And he
was very sad because he knew he had to kill her. And after
a while later the woodsman said, "Run away, run away, run
away quick, because I don't want to kill you." And Snow
White was very, very frightened. Why would the woodsman
want to kill her? But anyway, she ran, and she ran, and
she ran away from that woodsman.
Overall, the best examples of characterization appear to be
in the formal versions in both stories. At least, the most quotable
113
ones are from the formal versions, although examples are found in
the casual versions as well. Perhaps a formal style demands more
in terms of characterization, either consciously or unconsciously,
for children as well as adults.
Additional Details
Another option that exists for creating interest in a
narrative is the use of interesting details to embellish an event
or scene. Overall, there was an increase in the use of details
from the casual to the formal styles at both grade levels for both
tales. Four of the eight third graders provided new information in
their formal versions of Cinderella, as did seven of the eight sixth
graders. In Snow White four of the six third graders increased
their use of details in the formal version, and all five of the
sixth graders did. One third grader had a tremendous increase,
obvious from the length of her versions: the casual version with
158 words and the formal with 976 words.
The following examples from various students help to illus-
trate the increase in the use of details:
Casual Formal
Third: Then she rides away to the Then she's finally at the ball
ball. And then she starts and then she goes in and then
dancing, and then she she starts dancing and every-
leaves. . . . thing. And her mother and her
sisters don't even notice her.
And then when the clock gets
to twelve she has to leave,
and she goes away.
Third:
Sixth:
114
Casual
And she woke up and she
said, "Hello, my name is
Snow White." And then
they said their names,
and then she stayed.
Then she gets really mad
and she goes out into
the forest and she finds
where Snow White is stay-
ing at the dwarfs' house,
and then she gets an
apple and she falls
asleep.
But her mother said she
couldn't do it until she
did all this work, and
Cinderella worked all
day so that she could go,
but she didn't get it
done until after the
coach left to take her
sisters to the ball.
And she appealed to the
prince, and she had to go
at 12:00 midnight or she
would be turned back, and
she'd be nothing again.
So she accidentally dropped
her shoe when she was run-
ning out at 12:00 midnight,
and the prince found her
shoe.
And so then she woke up and
everybody went down on the
floor. And she woke up and she
said, "Oh, what are these little
men? You are so little." And
then they lived with her.
Grumpy didn't really want her,
except then he grew to like her
very much.
And then she hurried to her
laboratory, and she fixed a
rotten apple that would make
Snow White fall asleep. And
then she made a mixture for
herself to make her look real
old. And then after that Snow
White went to the door because
somebody had knocked on the
door. It was an old lady, the
wicked queen. She asked if she
would like an apple. Snow White
was delighted so she took the
apple but when she took one
bite she immediately fell onto
the floor.
She wanted to go, but her step-
mother said, "Only if you do
all this work," and she gave
her a whole list of jobs to do
before she could go. And by
the time the coach had arrived
to take her two stepsisters
away, she was still working on
scrubbing the living room
carpet.
And she appealed to the prince,
so the prince really liked her
and was going to marry her. At
12:00 she had to go, so she ran
out, and the prince was calling
her and calling her because he
loved her a lot. So then she
tripped and lost her shoe, and
then when she got back home,
she turned into her regular old
self. And then the prince. . . .
Casual
Sixth: A long, long time ago a
queen had a baby and named
named it Snow White.
And then she found a
cottage, and she went in
and cleaned it up because
it was all messy and
stuff.
Formal
Once upon a time there was a
queen, and she was sitting at
her window sewing one day, and
she chanced to prick herself.
And a few drops of blood fell
onto the snow, and she said
that her child's hair would be
as dark as the window pane,
and her lips would be as red
as blood, and she would call
her Snow White.
And then she found this cottage
in the woods, and then she went
in there, and it was all messed
up, and it had six little beds,
and the beds were all messed
up. The pillows were all over
it. And then she straightened
it up and there was dishes and
stuff all over the place. Then
she straightened it up.
With particular reference to the resolution in Cinderella--
and the final event leading up to the resolution--there is also an
increase in the use of additional details in the formal versions,
especially among third graders, seven of whom made their scenes
more dramatic in this way. The following excerpts, the first from
a third grader and the second from a sixth grader, illustrate:
9.9-5&1.
And they sent one of the night-
watchmen to see who would fit
the slipper, and Cinderella fit
it so they got married.
M
And the prince sent one of the
guards to find out who fitted
the slipper, and they tried
every house except for Cinder-
ella's. They tried everybody
in it except for Cinderella.
So he finally tried her and
it fit her, and everyone was
surprised.
116
Casual Formal
And the prince found her shoe And then the prince ordered a
and was going around trying it search of the entire kingdom
on everybody, and the shoe of anybody who could fit that
didn't fit anybody but her, so shoe to bring them to him.
Cinderella's fairy godmother So the guards went out, and
changed her back forever, the last person they tried
and then they got married on the shoe was Cinderella,
and lived happily ever after. and it fit, and so Cinderella
was real happy, and her fairy
godmother changed her back
into the pretty Cinderella,
and then she married the prince
and lived happily ever after.
The first example illustrates the increased suspense from casual to
formal style. It repeats "they tried . . . except for Cinderella"
as a way of building suspense and culminates it with "he finally
tried her and everybody was surprised." The second excerpt is
perhaps the more interesting. A more formal statement introduces
the formal version: "the prince ordered a search of the entire
kingdom"; and additional details complete it: "her fairy godmother
changed her back into the pretty Cinderella," and she was "real
happy."
The most dramatic scene for most of the Snow White stories
appears to be the scene when the queen, disguised as an old woman,
tries to kill Snow White with the poisoned apple. All but two of
the students (both third graders) used details to embellish this
event in their formal versions. The first excerpt is from a
third grader, the second from a sixth grader:
117
Casual Formal
Then this old woman came to the And a lady came to the door
seven drafts' door and gave Snow and said to Snow White, "Would
White a poisoned apple, and she you like to buy an apple?"
took a bit out of it and she And Snow White said, “Yes."
fell to the floor. And then she took an apple and
she went inside and shined it
up more, and she took a bite
out of it, and it was a
poisoned apple, and then she
fell to the floor.
And the wicked witch said, So she bought an apple, and
"Here, have a bit of my apple, the wicked witch said, "Here,
and I'll take a bite of the I will eat one half and you
other side, just to make sure will eat the other." And
that it wasn't poison." You Snow White said, "Sure." And
see, the witch only poisoned the queen took a bite and
half of the apple. And so nothing happened to her because
Snow White took a bite and the she took the half that wasn't
witch took a bite, and Snow poisoned. And then Snow White
White fell down, and she slept took a bite of the half that
and she slept, and meanwhile was poisoned and fell asleep--
the witch went away. half asleep, half dead. And
then the wicked witch laughed
and left. She was so happy.
Finally she would be the fair-
est of all in the land.
In the first example the suspense is heightened by the reference to
Snow White taking the apple in and shining it up--a stark contrast
to the fact of its being poisoned. The second example emphasizes
the queen's satisfaction in having poisoned Snow White and her
vanity in now being the fairest in the land. Although not all
formal versions were as dramatically changed as these, most of the
formal versions contained additional details heightening the effect
of the scenes leading to the resolution.
Increasing the details appears to be a favorite device for
both third and sixth graders for creating greater drama and interest
118
in the formal styles. In a sense, this technique is a kind of
evaluation device: adding details makes the story more reportable,
more worth the telling, more dramatic and effective. The excerpts
from the stories provided above seem to be irrefutable proof that
for the majority of third and sixth graders, the formal style
demands a finer sense of detail.
Relationship Between Episodes:
Cinderella
The coherence of a narrative is in part dependent on the
relationships that exist between episodes and how well those rela-
tionships are defined. For a narrative to develop logically, one
episode must follow another in logical order. (This applies only
to simple narratives, to be sure, not to more complex narratives
that use flashbacks, etc.)
To reiterate, the second episode of Cinderella is connected
to the first by a causal relationship. Cinderella's fairy godmother
comes because of Cinderella's unhappiness at not being allowed to
go to the ball. Her unhappiness is both a necessary and a suffi-
cient condition for the godmother to appear and to work her magic.
The second and third episodes are also connected causally:
Cinderella's wish to go and the fairy godmother's magic cause her
to go to the ball. The third and fourth episodes are connected by
a IHEN_relationship, indicating a temporal sequence in which the
third does not directly cause the fourth to occur but sets up the
necessary conditions for it to occur. Cinderella's going to the
ball allows the prince to dance with her and consequently fall in
119
love with her. This type of relationship is one of the easiest
to deal with in either production or comprehension of story material.
It simply calls for a conjoiner like "Then" or "And then," etc. to
connect one episode with another.
The more complex causal relationship, again, exists between
the fourth and fifth episodes. The prince's falling in love with
Cinderella at the ball causes him to chase her when she runs out
of the ballroom, and his finding the slipper enables him to search
for her.
Most third and sixth graders, in both styles, indicated
the causal relationships between the first and second episodes by
stating something like the following: "And then Cinderella began
to cry, and her fairy godmother came and asked her why she was
crying." The same is true of the relationship between the second
and third episodes: "And then she went to the ball." Few third
graders, however, either in their casual or f0rmal versions, made
the casual relationship explicit between the fourth and fifth epi-
sides. Many said something similar to the following statement
from the formal version of one third grader: "And he (the prince)
was going around, trying the shoe on everybody" without any specific
reference to cause. One third grader in her casual version said,
"And he was calling to her, 'Come back, come back,‘ because she
lost her slipper," implying a causal relationship different from
the one that actually exists in the story. The strongest statement
was one in the formal version, where she states, "He was chasing
her because he wanted her to stay longer."
The sixth graders expressed the causal relationship more
frequently in both styles. Three students explicitly stated the
relationship in their casual versions and four in their formal,
illustrated below:
9.11%].
So she started dancing with the
prince, and so he told his
mother than he had found a girl
. and so he found (the
slipper) and he told a man to
go look for it.
And he goes out searching for
her, and the lady who fits it
gets to marry him.
He wanted to marry her so his
messengers went to look for
the girl who the shoe would
fit.
Relationshipretween Episodes:
Snow White
Ems}.
And he says that he wants to
try the slipper on all the
girls who live there to find
the princess so he can marry
her.
And the prince said, "I want
that girl. That girl is for
me." And so he went to go
get a man . . . and so they
went to people's houses try-
ing on the glass slipper.
So she ran out, and the prince
was calling her and calling
her because he loved her a lot.
And then he said he wanted to
marry her, and so they went out
searching for the girl. . . .
The causal relationship existing between episodes one and
two is, in almost all cases, established by third graders in both
versions, but established very weakly in four of the six third
graders' casual versions and in three of the formal versions. They
simply state that the queen's dislike for Snow White is the cause
of the queen's order to have Snow White killed. But almost all
third graders in both styles state explicitly the causal relationship
121
between episodes two and three: Snow White's fleeing as a result
of the guard's order to kill her and his warning to her to flee.
The sixth graders expressed the causal relationship between
the queen's jealousy and Snow White's attempted murder. Of the five
sixth graders telling the tale, four in both versions stated the
fact of the queen's jealousy. They tended, as a group, however,
to place less emphasis on Snow White's fear. Many in both versions
said that Snow White was simply left in the woods.
The AND_relationship between episodes three and four indi-
cating the simultaneous activity of Snow White's being at the dwarfs'
house and the queen's finding out about it presented a problem for
most third graders and sixth graders. Only one third grader in both
versions indicated this relationship explicitly, in the first version
using the past perfect tense to indicate an action having been com-
pleted earlier, and in the second version using the connective
"meanwhile" to indicate simultaneous activity: "the queen had found
out about this" and "meanwhile, back at the palace. . . ." Only one
sixth grader in the casual version expressed this relationship:
"While she (Snow White) was preparing lunch, back at the castle,
the wicked queen. . . ." Two sixth graders in the formal version
used the "meanwhile" construction. Others simply indicated a
temporal relationship between the two episodes.
At the same time, there is a QAySE_relationship between
episodes two and four: the guard's not killing Snow White forces
the queen to try to do it herself. This cause relationship is made
explicit in three of the third graders' casual versions and in four
122
of their formal; and in two of the sixth graders' casual versions
and in three of their formal.
Discussion of Relationships
Between Episodes
The QApSE and the ANQ_relationships seem to present the most
difficulty f0r third and sixth graders, although the QAUSE_is less
difficult for sixth graders than for third graders; it may be the
complexity of the relationships between the second, third, and
fourth episodes that makes it difficult. One must be cautious,
however, in assuming that because these relationships are not always
made explicit, they are not comprehended or understood. It is highly
probable that these relationships can exist in the story-teller's
knowledge of the underlying structure of the story without being
explicitly realized in the surface of the story. As an example,
third graders seldom expressed the cause of the prince's running
out after Cinderella as she left the ball, but most did mention
their subsequent marriage and their living happily ever after.
In a similar vein, the fact that the queen tried to kill Snow White
implicitly suggests that she discovered that Snow White was still
alive. Perhaps the story-tellers' understanding of the causal
relationship was complete but the concept was simply not produced
in the performance of the narrative.
One must consider, too, the fact that at least one third
grader and two sixth graders expressed the AME relationship between
episodes three and four in Snow White suggests that this kind of
relationship can be both understood and expressed by children as
123
young as the third grade, although not all of the children may have
the syntactic control necessary to produce the constructions that
indicate this type of relationship, a point to be explored further
in this chapter.
At the same time, it is possible that children of the ages
of those in this study, particularly third graders, understand
causal in the abstract but not necessarily in the concrete.
Applebee's study of the spontaneous stories told by children shows
that the causal relationship is already being expressed by five-
year-olds, but it may be that, while they understand it in the
abstract, particular causes are mystifying. "Love" may be beyond
them; hence they do not understand nny_the prince chases Cinderella.
Coherence in Episodes
The organization of the tales is primarily a temporal
sequence of events; consequently most problems with organization
and coherence involve lack of transitions between scenes and
events, gaps and omissions in the ordering of events, and improper
sequencing of events.
Inadequate transitions occur in a few of the third graders'
Cinderella stories. One third grader, in particular, had no real
transition from Cinderella's crying to the coming of her fairy
godmother. She said, “So then she gone out to the backyard and
then she started crying. And then the fairy godmother said some-
thing back, 'Why are you crying?'" In her formal version she
essentially repeats this, and then goes on to describe Cinderella's
124
going to the ball, with the same lack of transition: "And so she
said, 'Remember to come back at midnight.‘ And so she gone. And
the young prince kept on dancing with her." Another third grader
failed to make a connection between the prince and the man who goes
around the town trying on the glass slipper:
She was too busy dancing with the prince, and she wasn't
paying attention to the clock. At twelve o'clock she ran
out, and she left her slipper there and everything was
turned back. Her clothes were all rags again. And then
there was this man who went around to all of the houses.
Is "this man" the prince, the prince's aide, someone else? One
cannot be sure. In the formal version, however, the connection is
improved:
Then the prince told this guy to go and find--to go in
every house and see whose foot would fit into it.
Two third graders in their casual style and one sixth grader
in her casual and formal styles had a very abrupt transition to the
seven dwarfs coming home: the first time they even mentioned the
dwarfs was in connection with the dwarfs coming home to find Snow
White dead; no previous mention had been made. A similar problem
occurs in the casual and formal versions of one third grader and
one sixth grader regarding the queen's showing up at the house of
the seven dwarfs without any reference to her having found out that
Snow White was even alive.
Some of the omissions in the ordering of events have already
been discussed, but smaller gaps occur which interfere with the
orderly flow of events due to insufficient information. Almost all
examples occurred in the stories told by third graders, suggesting
125
that they have somewhat less control of sequencing than sixth_
graders do.
Gaps like the following occurred in several stories
of the third graders, fewer in the formal versions than in the
casual, but still greater in number than in either the casual or
formal styles of the sixth graders:
1.
No mention is made that the stepmother/sisters go to
the ball, and yet Cinderella is described as getting
home just in time before her stepmother comes back.
â€The prince tried the stepmother and the stepsisters."
With what? No mention is made of the prince finding
the slipper, although it is mentioned that Cinderella
loses it.
"Information came in that he wanted to know all the
women, so she couldn't go because she didn't have all
of her work done." She couldn't go where? One must
know the story in order to understand it.
“Then she (Snow White) got married." One must assume
married to the prince, although it's not stated.
(The queen) took them (the apples) and went "Knock,
knock." Where did she go?
"And the queen said to the guard to put Snow White's
heart in it." The "it" obviously refers to the jewelry
box, although it's not stated in this third grader's
narrative.
The following excerpts illustrate the improper sequencing of events
that occurs, again, primarily in the prose of third graders, less
often in the formal than in the casual style, but much more fre-
quently than in either style of the sixth graders:
1.
And they went to the ball, and she asked if she could
go but they wouldn't let her because she had too much
work to do at home.
And then her sisters and her mother go to a dance and
then they tell her that she can't go because she has
to clean the house.
126
3. And then she starts dancing, and then she leaves,
and then she goes home and then she starts cleaning
some more and then her mother and her sisters come
home and then they tell her that it was a good dance.
And then when she starts to go out she loses her
glass shoe, and then she rides away.
4. And she went and she met a man and they danced until
midnight, and then it struck and her fairy godmother
said she would have to be back before it struck.
5. Grumpy was sad (after Snow White's death) and he grew
to like her very much.
In the first two examples, the story-tellers have the stepmother/
sisters giving Cinderella instructions after they have already left
for the ball. The third example provides a description of her losing
her slipper after she has returned home, and the fourth has the fairy
godmother instructing Cinderella to be home by midnight just as
Cinderella hears the clock strike twelve. (The fourth example does
have another interpretation, however. It is possible that the story-
teller meant "had said" by "said.") The fifth excerpt describes
Grumpy's increasing liking for Snow White after the fact of her
death has already been stated.
Generally, the sixth graders have greater control of
sequencing and of the use of transitions, therefore making fewer
mistakes in the temporal ordering of the narratives, in both casual
and formal styles. But, in defense of third graders, it must be
said that their narratives were generally longer, a factor that
makes the juggling of the details more complex. Those sixth graders
who did produce extensive narratives, however, controlled the
sequencing to a greater extent than the third graders with shorter
narratives.
127
Discussion of Results
It is clear from the data presented that third and sixth
graders, to some extent, are aware of the narrative demands of formal
narrative structure and of the need to supply details and sequence
for a listener. Motivation in the orientations and in the episodes
seems to increase slightly from casual to f0rmal styles for both
grade levels; the formal style appears to demand more coherence
than does the casual style; and it illustrates a slightly greater
development of characterization than does the casual style. In
almost all cases, the formal style of third and sixth graders
includes more details to heighten the effect of the action.
It is also clear from the data that sixth graders appear
to have greater productive control of narrative structure than third
graders in the following areas: higher frequency of including
‘important episodes and scenes; greater motivation and stronger
orientations; greater clarity in showing the relationship between
episodes; more control of coherence and sequencing. (Unfortunately
we have no data on how adults deal with these aspects of narrative
structure, so that we cannot compare sixth graders with adults on
this task.)
The greater ability of sixth graders to control sequencing
and provide coherence is not surprising when one considers the
stages of cognitive development represented by the students in this
study. According to Piaget's theory, the third graders have just
recently made the transition from pre-operational to concrete
operational. Theoretically third graders should be able to deal
128
with concrete operations, be able to form generalizations and clas-
sifications, but because the transition from one cognitive stage to
another is gradual rather than abrupt and immediate, it is safe to
assume that the type of thinking from an earlier stage is still
likely to appear later on during the transitional period, albeit
with less frequency. Because third graders are much closer in age
to pre-operational thought than sixth graders are, the narratives
of third graders contained more instances of pre-operational think-
ing, namely more instances of egocentric thought. Piaget suggests
that events in egocentric thought are more likely linked together
on the basis of personal interest than on temporal order. He says:
This mode of exposition, which consists in connecting
propositions by "and then" is typical. The conjunction
"and then" indicates neither a temporal, a causal nor a
logical relation, i.e., it indicates no relation which
the explainer could use in order to link his propositions
together for the purpose of a clear deduction or demon-
stration. The term "and then" marks a purely personal
connexion between ideas, as they arise in the mind of the
explainer. Now these ideas, as the reader may see, are
incoherent from the point of view of the logical or of
the natural order of things, although each one taken
separately is correct.
Certainly we cannot say that the narratives of third graders are
devoid of logical and/or temporal order. Most of them do, in fact,
demonstrate a fair amount of logical sequencing. However, in com-
parison with the sixth graders, the third graders' narratives more
frequently contain gaps in scenes and events, lack coherence in the
structure of the narratives, and lack transitions. According to
Piaget, the gradually developing ability to arrange a story or an
explanation in a definite order is acquired some time between the
129
ages of seven and eight. While my third graders are somewhat older
than this, eight or nine, their capacities for temporal and causal
sequencing are perhaps not fully matured, accounting for some of the
substantial differences between their narratives and those of the
sixth graders in this respect.
The preoperational child is weakly compelled to justify a
chain of reasoning because he lacks an awareness of the demands of
communication; the child exhibits little orientation toward the
15 In a similar vein James Britton describes
needs of the listener.
the language of young children as "expressive speech," similar to
the language of adults talking with friends, where there is little
d.'5 Older children such as the sixth
need to fill in the backgroun
graders in this study appear to be more aware of audience needs--
the need for background information--than younger children are, and
therefore they are more likely to make the relationships explicit
and the events and scenes more coherent and logically sequential.
The treatment of written language by Flowers and Hayes (1977)
in terms of writer-based or reader-based prose can also be applied
to spoken language. Writing/speaking for oneself, with little
thought of the needs of the reader/listener, often results in the
writer/speaker following the pattern of his/her own discovery
process. Reader/listener-based language, on the other hand, is
organized as an overview from which the reader/listener can see an
17 Sixth graders seem to have a
idea structure from the top down.
more sophisticated sense of plot structure, and they appear to be
more capable of seeing the whole, not just as an accumulation of
130
details, but as a cohesive unit. In this respect, their stories
are more comprehensible than those of the third graders.
A study by Gardner and Gardner discussed in Applebee (1977)
provides further evidence of this; they studied children of varying
ages in a story-completion task and found that six-year-olds treated
stories as though they were comic strips, eight-year-olds as a long
series of events involving a hero, and twelve-year-olds as a con-
sistent whole.18 Applebee's terms for these types of narratives are
unfocused chain narrative, focused chain narrative, and true narra-
tive. (See discussion in Chapter I, p. 25.) Many of the third
graders in this study exhibited characteristics of the focused chain
narrative in that their stories often were treated as a series of
episodes strung together but having either Snow White or Cinderella
as the central focus. The sixth graders, on the other hand, were
more likely to tell true narratives in which the incidents were
linked by both centering and chaining and where the relationships
were logically expressed.
Obviously the child's stage of cognitive development will
dictate, to some extent, the kind of narrative that will be pro-
duced. At the same time, we must be aware that a child's receptive
abilities are not always the same as his/her productive abilities.
A child may be perfectly capable of understanding a causal relation-
ship that he/she may not have full productive control of as yet.
Third graders seem to have an understanding of temporal and causal
relationships although not all of them made all of these relation-
ships explicit in the narratives they produced. Again, they may
131
understand causal at an abstract level but may not comprehend
particular causes.
The possibility exists that some of these performance prob-
lems may, in part, be attributed to a limited degree of productive
syntactic control. One of the third graders, as stated above,
apparently scrambled the sequence of events by saying, "And she went
and she met a man and they danced until midnight, and then it struck
and her fairy godmother said she would have to be back before it
struck." Her statement ostensibly suggests a reverse order of what
actually happens: she has the fairy godmother giving Cinderella
the warning pjppr the clock strikes twelve. This kind of sequencing
occurs much more frequently among the third graders than among sixth
graders. Sixth graders were likely to handle this in one of two
ways: either by placing the events in proper sequence to begin with,
or by using certain syntactic structures to help convey the intended
meaning. For example, suppose that in mid-sentence the narrator
realizes that she has forgotten to state the warning earlier; she
can embed the information as in this excerpt from one of the sixth
grader's stories:
And she's the only one the prince dances with, but she has
to be back by twelve o'clock, so when the clock strikes
twelve she leaves, but she loses her slipper.
Cinderella's having to be back by midnight causes her to leave
quickly. This is the equivalent of embedding it in an adverbial
clause: "Because she had to be home by midnight, she left when
the clock struck twelve.? Another sixth grader states: "When
twelve o'clock came, she had to go, so she ran down the stairs."
132
A third option is the use of the past perfect tense to
indicate a past action having been completed earlier. Instead of
the original statement, the narrator could have said: And she went
and she met a man and they danced until midnight, and then it struck,
and her fairy godmother npg_said she would have to be back before it
struck. Some third and sixth graders are capable of using the past
perfect construction, although I found few examples of its use in
this study. One third grader did say, as a way of indicating that
the queen had found out about Snow White's being alive: "The queen
had found out about this." And one sixth grader said, "Meanwhile
back at the palace the queen had made herself look like an old
lady . . ." and then went on to discuss the queen's going to Snow
White's house.
These examples suggest that sixth graders have a greater
degree of productive control of syntactic structures, a control
that allows them to control the meaning more precisely. It is not
that third graders aren't capable of using such structures but that
they simply do not use them as effectively, as frequently, or as
appropriately. Third graders do not have the same degree of control
of the linguistic structures that would allow them to cope with the
complexities of the meanings they want to convey.
My analysis thus suggests that the primary difference
between the narrative structure of third and sixth graders is a
matter of not always realizing in the surface story what they know
about the underlying structure. In some cases, at least, the degree
133
of syntactic control that the narrator possesses can affect the
structure of the narrative itself, a point to be explored further
in the next chapter.
FOOTNOTES-~CHAPTER IV
1Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary
Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 86.
2Nancy L. Stein and Christine G. Glenn, "An Analysis of
Story Comprehension in Elementary School Children: A Test of a
Schema," ERIC, No. ED 121474, p. 56.
3Ibid., p. 57.
4Ibid., p. 11.
5Ibid.
6William Labov, "The Transformation of Experience in
Narrative Syntax," in Language in the Inner City: Studies in the
Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1972), p. 364.
7Stein and Glenn, pp. 11-12.
8Ibid, p. 45.
9Jean Mandler and Nancy'S.Johnson, "Remembrance of Things
Parsed: Story Structure and Recall," Cognitive Psychology, 9
(1977), 145.
10V. Propp. Morphology of the Folktale (Austine: University
of Texas Press, 1968), pp. 75-6.
11
Stein and Glenn, pp. 11-14.
121bid., p. 14.
13Ibid., p. 371.
14Jean Piaget, The Language and Thougnt of the Child (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.), pp. 108-9.
15Arthur N. Applebee, The Child's Concept of Story (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 99.
134
135
16James Britton, Language and Learning (London: Penguin
Press, 1970), p. 169. *
17Linda S. Flowers and John R. Hayes, "Problem-Solving
Strategies and the Writing Process," College English, 39 (December
1977 . 460.
18Applebee, p. 121.
CHAPTER V
NARRATIVE: DISCURSIVE STRUCTURE
Discursive Structure: A Schema
Narrative structure has two dimensions. Story, discussed
in the preceding chapter, consists of the internal relations of
action and character. The second dimension of narrative is dis-
cursive structure, a term that Seymour Chatman (1969) uses to des-
cribe the literary aspects of fiction--"the verbal means by which
1 It is the set
the author communicates the story to his audience."
of external relations between narrator and reader that includes time,
aspect, and mode of narrative. Narrative perspective is a bridge to
outside reality. Chatman (1975) discusses narrative transmission
and this relationship between narrator and audience as follows:
The initial question, then, is whether a narrator is
present, and if he is, how his presence is recognized
and how strongly it is felt by the audience. The nar-
rator comes into existence when the story itself is
made to seem a demonstrable act of communication. If
an audience feels that it is in some sense spoken pp_
(regardless of the medium), then the existence of a
teller must be presumed.
This relationship between narrator and audience is the
central focus of Labov's study (1972) of the structure of the per-
sonal narratives or black pre-adolescents and adolescents concerning
a brush with death or a dangerous situation that they encountered
at one time or another. Labov's analysis includes what he considers
136
137
to be the six elements in an extended narrative: an abstract, an
orientation, the complicating action, the evaluation, the result or
resolution, and the coda. Not all narratives contain all six ele-
ments; they are simply analytical categories developed by Labov and
not intended to indicate that the success of the narrative is
dependent on the presence of all the categories. Three have been
treated as aspects of Story in Chapter IV: orientation, complicat-
ing action, and resolution; the remaining three will be discussed
in this chapter specifically because they are aspects of discursive
structure--the relationship between narrator and audience. To be
sure, such a division is artificial. Obviously audience awareness
and the situational context of the language event are important
factors in the story structure, as discussed in Chapter IV. The
present chapter will discuss all the elements to the extent to which
they are affected by audience awareness. Story structure cannot be
totally understood when viewed outside the framework of the context
of the situation, a point understood and developed by Labov (1972)
in his analysis of narratives. Labov discovered that the narrative
structure was affected in significant ways by the kinds and degree
of evaluative elements included in the narrative. What a speaker
chooses to include will be directly affected by the situational
context--the audience, the purpose, the topic. To ignore these
variables in the study of narrative structure is to limit the
analysis in fundamental ways.
Labov defines abstract as one or two clauses at the begin-
ning of the narrative that summarize the whole story; he defines
138
ppgp_as clauses appearing at the end of the narrative that signal
that the narrator is finished; and he defines evaluation as that part
of the narrative that gives the reason for telling it, the reasons
why the narrative is reportable and worth telling. Particularly in
personal narratives, the abstract helps to establish the relationship
between narrator and audience, the coda serves to close off the rela-
tionship, and the evaluation serves to convince the audience that the
narrator has a reason for telling it. The following discussion will
show both the similarities and the differences in how personal and
vicarious narratives use these narrative elements.
Abstract in Discursive Structure
Personal narratives often begin wtih one or two clauses that
summarize the whole story or encapsulate the point of the story and,
as such, add to the worthwhileness of reporting the experience. They
can also indicate that what follows is a narrative and not some other
kind of discourse. An example offered by Labov of a typical abstract
in a personal narrative is one at the beginning of a fight narrative:
"Well, I talked an old man out of pulling the trigger." The narra-
tive itself goes on to relate details of the incident. The abstract
establishes the main point of the experience and convinces the
audience that the experience is a reportable narrative. An abstract
does not appear in all personal narratives, but when it does, it
contributes to the evaluative force of the narrative.
No abstracts appeared in any of the stories told by my sub-
jects, perhaps for a variety of reasons. One may be the nature of
139
the speech event itself. The narratives of Labov's subjects were
provided in response to the question, "Were you ever in a situation
where you were in serious danger of being killed, where you said to
yourself--'This is it'?" In response to this question one is more
likely to introduce the narrative with an abstract that provides an
overview of the experience. The narratives of my subjects were
neither personal nor in response to a question.
If the third and sixth graders in this study had been given
the task of telling what a story was about rather than the task of
telling the story itself, their responses would more likely have
contained abstracts like: "Cinderella was about this girl who . . a"
a kind of narrative that Applebee refers to as a summary or synopsis
rather than a retelling.
A third reason for the lack of abstracts may be that because
of the nature of the task they were asked to perform, my students
assumed that the listener already knew the story; there was no need
for an introductory statement about the tale itself. The tales are
familiar ones, and the fact that I asked for a telling of these
tales specifically suggests that I need no introduction to them.
Besides, no fairy tale begins with an abstract of the kind found in
personal narratives; it begins with an introductory formula desig-
nating that a fairy tale narrative is about to begin. Any other
kind of abstract would be inappropriate, a concept that both third
and sixth graders appear to have.
Narratives begin with what Kernan (1977) callsuan"introducer
., some relatively stylized way of indicating that what follows
140
is a narrative and . . . is not subject to the rules of sequencing
3 The introducer in fairy
that apply to dialogue or conversation."
tales-is often the formulaic "Once upon a time." Since story-
tellers, under fairly formal circumstances, would be compelled to
use the expected, traditional introducer, one would expect that the
formal versions, in particular, would contain the formula. This is
precisely what I found, with greater use in the formal style for
both grade levels, illustrated below:
TABLE ll.--Types of Introducers.
Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
Introducers (N = 15) (N = 15)
Casual
Once upon a time 13 percent 20 percent
Once there was (were) 20 7
There was (were) 20 27
Other 47 47
Formal
Once upon a time 47 53
Once there was (were) 20 13
There was (were) 7 13
Other 27 20
Few differences exist between grade levels, but there is consider-
able difference at both grade levels between casual and formal
styles. "Once upon a time" increases for third graders from 13
percent to 47 percent, and for sixth graders from 20 to 53 percent.
(Other elements of the formula, such as rare diction, were discussed
in Chapter III.)
141
Coda in Discursive Structure
The coda in the personal narrative, in addition to signal-
ling the end of the narrative, may also contain general observations
or show the effects of the events on the narrator. Labov's example
from a fight narrative illustrates:
I was given the rest of the day off. And ever since then
I haven't seen ths guy 'cause I quit. I quit, you know.
No more problems.
Similar codas may be found in fictional narration, depending on the
degree of narrator intervention, particularly if the story is told
from the first person point of view.
Other codas merely bridge the gap between the moment of time
at the end of the narrative itself and the present, and forestall
5 The codas that I found in
further questions about the narrative.
my study served this function. They sometimes consisted of the
traditional fairy tale formula, "And they lived happily ever after,"
with a greater use in the formal rather than casual versions for
both grade levels. Most of the story-tellers just ended the tales
without the coda, and a few said, "And that's the end"(see Table 12).
Twenty—seven percent of the third graders and twenty percent of the
sixth graders had no codas in their casual style, but both grades
increased their use of the codas in the formal style, the third graders
to forty-seven percent and the sixth graders to sixty-seven percent.
The differences are substantial. Obviously the formal style demands
a formal coda for both grade levels, but the sixth graders, particu-
larly, seem to recognize its importance in the formal style. The
142
coda, it appears, is a crucial narrative element in formal narrative
speech events, especially for older children.
TABLE 12.--Percentage of Types of Codas.
Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
Codas (N = 15) (N = 15)
Happily ever after
Casual 20 percent 20 percent
Formal 4O 27
That's the end
Casual 7 0
Formal 7 40
None
Casual 73 80
Formal 53 33
Both the abstract (or introducer) and the coda in narrative
structure help to establish the set of external relations between
narrator and audience. They formally introduce and close off the
narrative. It appears from this data that both third graders and
sixth graders recognize their importance and have some control of
these elements, for both grade levels increase their use of intro-
ducers and codas in their formal versions. They appear, then, to
recognize the need for identifying the beginnings and endings of
narratives, a recognition that manifests itself primarily in the
more formal of the language events.
143
Evaluation in Discursive Structure
Labov states that the evaluation of the narrative-~the means
used by the narrator to indicate the point of the narrative--is the
most important element in a narrative in addition to the basic nar-
rative clause because it helps to prevent the "So what?" response
6 Narratives can be evaluated
and registers the narrative reportable.
by external methods in which the narrator steps out of the bounds of
the narrative itself, or by internal methods in which the evaluative
comment is embedded within the narrative, a point discussed exten-
sively in Chapter IV.
Labov's evaluation, in terms of narrator intervention, is
similar to Chatman's concept of narrative transmission. Chatman
treats narrative transmission as being on a continuum from unmediated,
mimetic, where the narrator is unobtrusive, to mediated, where the
narrator recounts, describes, and presents his view of the story--a
highly vocal and visible narrator who, on occasion, may direct his
remarks to his audience, apart from the story itself, as a commentary
on events or as an observation on the meaning of the events in the
story.
In the narratives told by my students the narrators' voices
were never obtrusive and direct, primarily because all narratives
were told in the third person. Nevertheless, there was some use of
external evaluation, where the narrator stepped outside the bounds
of the narrative to report on characters' internal responses, such
as "And she was feeling very sad," and "The stepmother didn't like
Cinderella." As I discussed in Chapter IV, a number of third and
144
sixth graders referred to the state of mind of characters: "the
stepmother/sisters were very confused," "everyone was surprised."
Most of these responses were recorded in the formal versions. Feel-
ings and emotions were recorded more often in the formal versions
and more frequently among the sixth graders' formal versions: "she
was feeling really bad," "she went to the ball happily," "the prince
really liked her," and "Cinderella was really happy."
The more deeply embedded the evaluation is, the closer the
narrative comes to the mimetic end of the continuum where the story
is allowed to speak for itself. Skilled narrators can "show" the
point of the story--its worth--by objectively describing what happens
to the characters, their external responses and the results of those
responses. But this kind of narrative demands considerable skill.7
Some of the narratives in my study illustrated a skillful use of
embedded evaluation, such as the following excerpt from a sixth
grader's formal version of "Cinderella" in which the stepsisters'
actions and words convey their cruelty to Cinderella:
And then they all announced, "Let's go to the ball, let's
go to the ball." And Cinderella was talking about how she
wanted to go to the ball. So they said, "You funny thing."
And she said, "I'm not funny-looking." And they started
laughing at her, and they said, "Come here and help me zip
up this dress. Come here, come help me do this. Wash the
floors. You're going to stay here and do the chores."
Not all of my students demonstrated this degree of skill in
the use of embedded evaluation of this type. Many had to rely on
external evaluation as well, and the narratives of those who didn't
use some external evaluation and of those who did not demonstrate
145
skill with this type of embedded evaluation were lacking in interest
and excitement. The result was a bland, unimaginative story that
would have difficulty convincing the listener of its reportability.
Although my instructions did not specifically ask for imaginative
stories, my assumption was that the task itself, telling a story
for someone else to read, would encourage imaginative stories. The
following "Cinderella" story told by a sixth grader for her formal
version is largely unevaluated:
Once upon a time there was a girl named Cinderella, and she
lived with her two stepsisters and her stepmother. One day
her stepsisters and stepmother were invited to a ball, and
she wasn't invited. And they made her do all the housework.
And right after they left. since she wanted to go so much,
her fairy godmother came and made a pumpkin from the garden
into a coach, and gave her a gown, and she went to the ball.
And she had to be back home by midnight. And as it started
striking midnight, she ran out and she lost one of her glass
slippers, and the prince found it, and he looked everywhere
to find her. And when he finally did, they were married,
and she was a princess, and that's the end.
There is little evaluation in terms of showing Cinderella's
responses or telling about them, and there are no details for
interest or emphasis. Adding details makes the story more report-
able, more dramatic and effective, as demonstrated by the following
“Cinderella" story, a formal version told by a sixth grader:
Cinderella was a girl that lived in a little cottage, and
she had a stepmother and two stepsisters. And her step-
mother was like a slavedriver and didn't like her step-
daughter so made her work all the time, and made her real
daughters always be real pretty and everything. And then
she worked and worked and worked, and she didn't have any
time to play or anytime to make herself look pretty, and
she really wanted to be pretty. And she wanted to go to
a ball, because they lived in a town where kings and
queens and princes and stuff lived, and she wanted to
146
marry the prince. And so then she was crying one night
when the ball came because the prince was looking for a
bride, and her fairy godmother came for her and asked
her what she was crying about. And she told her fairy
godmother than she wanted to go to the ball, and that
she'd like to marry the prince. So the fairy godmother
turned a pumpkin into a stagecoach and made three mice
horses, and two mice stagecoach drivers, and they went
to the ball. And her fairy godmother included that she
had to be back by twelve last chime, and so she said,
"All right!‘ And so then she went to the ball, and she
had a really good time and she appealed to the prince.
So the prince really liked her and was going to marry
her. At twelve o'clock she had to go, so she ran out
and the prince was calling her and calling her because
he loved her a lot. So then she tripped and lost her
shoe, and then when she got back home she turned into
her regular old self. And then the prince ordered a
search of the entire kingdom of anybody who could fit
that shoe to bring them to him. So the guards went
out, and the last person they tried on the shoe was
Cinderella, and it fit, and so Cinderella was real
happy, and her fairy godmother changed her back into
the pretty Cinderella, and then she married the prince
and lived happily ever after.
This version contains a great amount of detail; it tells about
Cinderella's internal responses (external evaluation) and also shows
them (internal evaluation). The result is a reportable narrative in
contrast to the previous example. (The use of detail is discussed
at length in Chapter IV, along with illustrations of its increased
use in the formal versions of both third and sixth graders.)
The use of dialogue is another method for embedding evalua-
tion: the character's words can make the point of the story and
indicate the story's worthiness as illustrated above in the excerpt
containing the dialogue between Cinderella and her stepsisters.
Dialogue provides dramatic effect, something that is missing in
narratives where the narrator merely 3211; rather than gnpnp.
Dialogue is used with a substantially greater frequency by third
147
graders than by sixth graders, and it is used much more frequently
in the formal versions than in the casual for both grade levels,
with the greatest increase occurring from the casual to the formal
of the sixth graders. Table 13 shows for each grade level the ratio
of instances of quoted dialogue per 100 T-Units.
TABLE l3.--Ratio of Instances of Quoted Dialogue per 100 T-Units for
"Cinderella" and "Snow White."
Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
(N = 14) (N = 12)
Casual .77 .24
Formal .97 .63
While the use of dialogue, overall, is infrequent, with less
than 1 T-Unit in 100 containing dialogue, the greater degree of
dialogue among third graders is somewhat surprising, given the fact
that its use is an embedded form of evaluation. If the use of
dialogue is a sophisticated evaluative form, why do we find third
graders using it more frequently than sixth graders? One possible
explanation is that, even though it is an embedded form of evalua-
tion, third graders feel more at ease with quoted dialogue perhaps
because they are closer in age to the story—telling mode and because
they are especially familiar with stories that make frequent use of
dialogue, basal readers for example. Their own use of dialogue may
reflect the style of stories with which they are most familiar.
148
Applebee's explanation (1978) is similar. He found in his
study of the stories told by children and adolescents and their dis-
cussions of those stories that younger children are more likely to
produce real retellings of stories, with more detail, than older
children are. Older children, because of their increasing cognitive
ability to generalize and analyze, are more likely to produce sum-
maries and synopses of stories rather than retellings.8 The sixth
graders in this study may simply be beyond the true retelling stage
in narrative, as defined by Applebee, and may prefer the summary form
that includes less dialogue, at least in their casual versions. But
the increase of dialogue in their formal versions is substantial, from
.24 to .63. Possibly sixth graders recognize the dramatic effect of
dialogue and consequently use it when that effect is most important--
in the formal versions that will be read or heard by other children.
Third graders may be using dialogue primarily because of their
familiarity with it from the stories they read, while sixth graders
may be more conscious of its dramatic possibilities and use it more
consciously in their formal versions.
Evaluation and Syntax
Narrative transmission, according to Labov, is not limited
to narrative perspective, point of view, or the kinds of evaluation
discussed in the previous section; it also involves the internal
structure of narrative clauses, their syntactic complexity or
simplicity, and the effect of this complexity or simplicity on the
narrative itself.9
149
According to Labov, the narrative clause itself is one of
the simplest grammatical patterns in connected speech, true of adult
narratives as well as those of children and adolescents.10 He
describes the basic syntax as consisting of eight elements: (1)
sentence adverbials and conjunctions, (2) simple subjects, (3) the
underlying auxiliary as a simple past tense marker which is incor-
porated in the verb, (4) preterite verbs, with adverbial particles,
(5) complements like direct or indirect objects, (6) manner or
instrumental adverbials, (7) locative adverbials, and (8) temporal
adverbials and comitative clauses. Such syntax produces sentences
in narrative structure like: "This boy punched me and I punched
him. Then the teacher came in and stopped the fight," illustrated
in this way:]]
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
This boy punched me
and I punched him
Then the teacher came in
and stopped the fight.
Any departure from this basic narrative syntax complicates
the syntax, says Labov, and he classifies the major departures as
intensifiers, comparators, correlatives, and explicatives, each
category containing a number of subtypes. He says that such
syntactic complexities added to the basic narrative syntax are
usually evaluative elements: "Since syntactic complexity is
relatively rare in narratives, it must have a marked effect when
150
it does occur. And in fact, we find that departures from the basic
12 Evaluation,
narrative syntax have a marked evaluative force."
then, manifests itself by syntactic complexity. The form of embedded
evaluation necessarily complicates the basic syntactic structure and
often has an evaluative force. It must be clear, of course, that
not all occurrences of these syntactic elements have an evaluative
function; in some cases they serve a purely referential function in
which they clarify the factual circumstances surrounding the nar-
13 But for the most part the increased use of these elements
rative.
enhances the evaluative force of the narrative.
Table 14, presented here as an orientation for the reader,
provides the results of the three categories of evaluative syntax
analyzed in this study. Following the table, each of the categories,
along with the category of intensifiers (not included in the table),
will be discussed in detail.
TABLE l4.--Frequency of Comparatives, Correlatives, and Explicatives
for 100 T-Units.
Grade Level 3 Grade Level 6
Evaluative Syntax (N = 15) (N = 15)
Comparatives (she was the fairest
Casual of all) 1.38 3.74
Formal 1.73 4.32
Correlatives (C. is staying . . .,
Casual feeling really bad) .97 1.65
Formal .98 1.69
Explicatives (While, since, if
Casual clauses, etc.) 2.52 3.72
Formal 2.27 5.06
151
Intensifiers
Labov describes narrative clauses as a linear series of
events which are organized in the narrative in the same order as
they occurred. An intensifier selects one of these events and
strengthens or intensifies it in a number of ways: (1) by express-
ing phonology like "and we were fighting for a lo-o-ong time,
buddy"; (2) by quantifiers like 311, often inserted at a critical
point in preadolescent narratives; and (3) by repetition of a word
or phrase.14
None of these complicates the structure very much,
however. My study shows very few differences between the causal
and formal styles in the use of quantifiers or repetitions. The
quantifier 311 was used very frequently in both styles, at both
grade levels: "all her dresses,“ "so she cleaned it all up," "all
the time,“ etc. There were greater differences in frequency between
the two grade levels, with the third graders using more quantifiers
like very, all, too, really, etc., but they used slightly fewer
repetitions than the sixth graders, such as "she slept and slept,"
"she ran and ran," "very, very, very messy," and "she was lying
there, just lying there." Certainly intensifiers are evaluative
elements, but overall, there did not appear to be significant
differences between casual and formal styles or between grade
levels in their use.
Comparators
Comparators are elements which compare one thing with
another, or compare events which did occur to those which did not
152
occur.15 Labov classifies negatives, futures, and modals as
comparators in the latter category, dealing with a level of expected
and unrealized events which go beyond basic narrative sequence. To
some extent they complicate the syntax, and they usually have an
evaluative function. Questions and imperatives, of a higher degree
of syntactic complexity, also often have an evaluative function, but
they were almost non-existent in my data. The analysis of compara-
tors in this study, therefore, was limited to Labov's last subtype,
the comparative, which he considers as reaching the highest level
16 The comparative includes the grammatical
of syntactic complexity.
comparative and superlative such as "she was the fairest of all;"
clauses with a§_and prepositional phrases with like} and metaphors
and similes. I found examples of comparatives and superlatives in
both styles at both grade levels, with slight increases from casual
to formal styles at both grade levels, and with fairly substantial
increases from third graders to sixth graders. Examples include
"she was the beautifulest girl," "the prettiest of all," "she ran
as fast as she could," "all dressed up as a little old lady," "it
smelled like a great big flower patch," and "the oldest, fattest,
with the longest beard." Only two subjects, both sixth graders,
used a simile describing Snow White's beauty: "And the baby's hair
was as black as coal, and her skin was as white as snow, and her
lips were as red as cherries." Certainly the use of such compara-
tives adds evaluative force to the narratives and intensifies the
descriptions being made. The increase from third grade to sixth
grade may be a reflection of the older children's ability to
153
control more complex syntax, a point to be discussed later in this
chapter.
Correlatives
Correlatives bring together two events conjoined in a single
independent claUse. The operation requires complex syntax because
it involves both deletion and conjoining transformations. Correla-
tives include the following syntactic elements in increasing order
of syntactic complexity:
l. Progressives in pe,;,jng_
2. Appended participles in which one or more verbs in
-jng_are aligned, with tense marker and pp_deleted:
"He was sitting there, minding his own business."
3. Double appositives such as "a knife, a long one, a
dagger"
Double attributives such as "a cold, wet day“
Left-embedded participles such as "an unsavory-
1ooking passenger," much more syntactically complex
than right-embedded ones.)7
(II-11>
Correlatives serve an evaluative function because they
suspend the action, bring in a wider range of simultaneous events,
and heighten the effect of the situation.
My analysis consisted of elements two through five. Pro-
gressives were very numerous in both styles and at both grade levels
and did not enter into my analysis. A small number of appended
participles occurred with even distribution between styles and
between grade levels. Examples include "And Cinderella is staying
with the stepmother, feeling really bad," "And they started going
around, trying to fit the slipper on people's feet," "She was clean-
ing out the house, dusting . . .," "She was crying, wishing that she
could go," and "She was sitting at her window, sewing one day."
154
Although there were no double appositives in my data, there
were numerous double attributives, possibly because appositives are
a less common syntactic pattern than are attributives. Of the
twenty-two double attributives, only six appear in the casual styles
and sixteen appeared in the formal styles, with relatively little
difference between grade levels. Their use is apparently determined
by the purpose of the speech act and degree or formality of the task,
a conclusion supported by Labov's results. He says that double
attributives are as rare as double appositives in colloquial speech.
The fact that the majority of double attributives were found in the
formal style suggests that the degree of formality of the speech
act plays an important role in their frequency. Examples included
"little old lady," "mean, grumpy stepmother," "great big beautiful
glass coffin," "wicked old hag," and "big, ugly wolf." Their use
obviously makes the story more interesting, more reportable, par—
ticularly because many of the double attributives were used with
reference to the antagonists in the stories, as noted in the above
examples, perhaps as a way of establishing and developing the con-
flict between the major characters in the tales, a point discussed
later in this chapter.
I found only one case of a left-embedded participle, appear-
ing in one of the sixth grader's stories: "it was a messy-looking
place." This syntactic construction is apparently quite complex
and demands a high degree of syntactic control, a possible explana-
tion of why no other examples were found in all of the data.
155
Explicatives
Explicatives are separate clauses appended to the main
narrative clause; they include qualifications introduced by while,
though, and if, and causal clauses introduced by since, because, or
so that, etc. Their evaluative function is to suspend the action of
the narrative and to transfer the attention of the listener backward
‘8 They serve to
or forward or into a realm of abstract speculation.
bring several actions together in the same sentence, thereby increas-
ing suspense. Many of the explicatives in my study did not have an
evaluative function, particularly the because clauses that functioned
to clarify the text. lj_clauses were used by some third graders but
more frequently by sixth graders, and only sixth graders used eyep.
pnppgn_clauses, suggesting that clauses of qualification demand a
degree of control manifested more often in the oral language of
older children.
In general at both grade levels (see Table 14) one finds a
slight increase from casual to formal style, with two exceptions.
One is the slight decrease in the third graders' use of explicatives.
The other is the fairly large gain in the use of explicatives for
the sixth graders, probably reflecting their increased use of qual-
ifying clauses. Overall the trend is for an increase in syntactic
complexity from casual to formal style which simultaneously adds
evaluative force to the narrative.
While these examples of syntactic complexity do not neces-
sarily prove an association with evaluation of the narrative, they
do strongly suggest the association. Labov says:
156
. . . most occurrences of these features are closely linked
to the evaluation of the narrative: they intensify certain
narrative events that are most relevant to the main point;
they compare events that did occur to those which might have
but did not occur; they correlate the linear dimension of
the narration by superimposing one event upon another; and
they explicate the point of the narrative in so many words.19
Labov's study was partially an attempt to assess the
development of evaluative syntax with age. His age divisions were
(1) pre-adolescents, 9-13 years of age, (2) adolescents, 14-19 years
of age, and (3) adults. It is difficult to make a comparison of my
results with his because the third graders in my study are barely
pre-adolescents by his standards, and the sixth graders are still
pre-adolescents, so that both of the grade levels fit more or less
into his youngest category. His results, however, are suggestive
for my study.
Labov reports a regular and marked increase for all four
categories from pre-adolescents to adolescents to adults, intensi-
fiers showing the least amount of increase, comparators showing a
somewhat greater increase, and the correlatives and explicatives
20 This study's results parallel
showing the sharpest increase.
Labov's. Increases from third to sixth graders occur in all three
categories, with slight increases in the correlatives and sub-
stantial increases in both comparatives and explicatives. This
data supports Labov's conclusion that there is a correlation between
increases in these types of syntactic complexity and increases in
chronological age. While most of these evaluative structures are
used by third graders, their use increases dramatically by sixth
graders.
157
Evaluation in Vicarious Narrative
Labov states clearly that most examples of evaluation are
to be found in narratives of personal experience rather than in
narratives of vicarious experience. In the latter, though events
may be remarkable, there is little urgency for the speaker to
justify the telling of the story because there is little personal
involvement in the events of the narrative. Labov contrasts the
narrative of a favorite TV program told by one of the adolescents
with the highly evaluative narrative of another adolescent telling
about a fight he had been in. Given this contrast between personal
and vicarious narrative, one would not expect much evaluation in
the narratives in my study. There is no personal involvement in
the events of the fairy tales, the situation for telling it is
fairly contrived, and the events in the tales are quite predictable,
both in terms of their familiarity and their basic fairy tale
formulas. Nevertheless, numerous examples of evaluative narrative
exist in the data.
One possible reason is that fairy tales are not like TV
shows. Fairy tales may speak to subconscious needs, desires, fears,
whereas TV shows generally do not. Hence, the involvement of the
teller may be greater in fairy tales. This possibly accounts for
the higher degree of evaluation found in the tales than one might
expect.
The excerpts that follow illustrate the evaluative syntax
of third and sixth graders, but they also include other forms of
evaluation discussed in Chapter IV and at the beginning of this
158
chapter: the use of dialogue, descriptions of internal and external
responses, and details of the relationships of the characters, all
of which help to heighten the effect of the narrative and make the
telling more worthwhile.
In the majority of cases, the formal versions were more
highly evaluated than the casual, and the sixth graders' much more
so than the third graders', the reasons for which will be discussed
later in this chapter.
The first two Cinderella stories are fairly representative
of the third graders' narratives:
"Cinderella" (casual version)
There was two stepsisters and one stepmother and a little
girl named Cinderella. They boss her around and make her
do all the work and do their hair and button their shirts
and stuff like that. And they were invited to a ball--a
dancing party--so they got it and they read it, and they
said it was good, and Cinderella couldn't go because she
didn't have anything to wear, and they didn't let her.
And so they went, and Cinderella was crying. And a fairy
godmother came and made a dress and made a coach for her
and turned a mouse into a horse and a pumpkin into a car-
riage. And she went, and she met a man, and they danced
until midnight, and then it struck. And her fairy god-
mother said she would have to be back before it struck.
And she went back, and she lost her slipper, and it was
too late, and she lost her horses, and they turned back
into mices. And then she walked home, and the prince
tried the stepsisters and the stepmother. Their mother
locked her up upstairs, and she couldn't get out. And
then this one fat mice unlocked it, and she came down,
and the prince tried it on and they got married.
"Cinderella" (formal version)
Once upon a time there was two stepsisters and one step-
mother, and there was a little girl named Cinderella. And
she was like a slave, and they made her hem their dress
and put makeup and put their shoes on. And they got a
159
message, and it said that they could come to the ball for
a dance, and Cinderella didn't get to go. And they left,
and she had to do all this work, and she was crying, and
so she went outdoors and was crying. And this one fairy
godmother came and said, "Why are you crying?" And she
said she couldn't go to the ball. And then she made her
into a pretty girl with a dress and took her to the ball.
She told her she should come back at twelve o'clock. And
so she was going, and she met a man, and they danced
together until it was twelve o'clock, and then she ran,
and her shoe came off, and she walked home. And the man
that she met came to their house and tried everyone. And
Cinderella got locked upstairs, and then the big fat mouse
unlocked it. She got out, and she tried it on, and they
got married.
The first rarely goes beyond basic narrative syntax. The intensi-
fier all is used once in this narrative, and there is a causal
clause introduced by because.
The second uses more of the syntactic elements being dis-
cussed. {All_as an intensifier is used once, and girl is modified
by pretty. The comparative like a slave is used, and there is some
repetition of Cinderella's crying as a means of heightening the
effect of the situation. Dialogue also adds dramatic force to the
story. While the differences between these two versions are not
outstanding, there is noticeably more evaluation in the formal
version than in the casual.
More striking are the evaluative elements found in some of
the stories of the sixth graders, the formal more highly evaluative
than the casual. The following two excerpts are from a sixth
grader:
160
"Cinderella" (casual version)
Cinderella and her stepsisters they were going to this ball,
and she asked them could she go, and she said, "No, you look
too funny." And so she started crying, and then her fairy
godmother came and told her not to cry. She had this magic
want stick, and she made her a dress and everything and some
glass slippers. And she turned a pumpkin into a coach. And
there were three mice, and she turned them into some horses,
and then they went to the ball. . . .
"Cinderella" (formal version)
Once upon a time there were three stepsisters with Cinderella,
and they were going to the ball, and then they all announced,
"Let's go to the ball, let's go to the ball." And Cinderella
was talking about how she wanted to go to the ball. So they
said, "You funny thing." And she said, "I'm not funny-
looking." And they started laughing at her. And they said,
"Come here and help me zip up this dress. Come here. Come
help me do this. Wash them floors. You're going to stay
here and do the chores." And so then they left. And she
started going over there by the fireplace. And she started
crying. And then her fairy godmother came and said, "Don't
cry. I'll fix you up." And so she changed her into a
pretty girl. And there was three white mouse [sic] and she
changed them into white horses, and a pumpkin she changed
that into a coach. . . .
There is more dialogue in the f0rmal version, although the sixth
graders, as we noted, use much less dialogue than the third graders.
There are more examples of repetition for emphasis and effect, par-
ticularly in the conversation between Cinderella and the stepsisters.
Their repetitious commands to Cinderella emphasize their cruelty to
her and their conflict with her. The intensifier 111 is used, and
there are more noun modifications: preppy girl, nnipe_mouse, EDIEE.
horses.
Another sixth grader told the story of Snow White. Following
are some excerpts from her versions:
161
"Snow White" (casual version)
1. So he took Snow White out to the woods. And then he
was about to kill her, and he decided he couldn't do
it. So he told Snow White to run away into the woods
and never, ever come back. So she ran, and she ran,
and she ran, and at night she lay down, and she
started crying. . . .
2. And so the next morning the dwarfs went away to their
mine. And Snow White made breakfast, but before they
left, Happy said to make sure that she wasn't to let
any strangers in because it may be the wicked witch
in disguise. . . .
3. And then she went downstairs into her secret cellar
and made up a potion and put on a secret disguise
and went out through her secret door and went to
the woods. . . .
"Snow White" (formal version)
1. So he took Snow White into the woods, and she was
picking flowers and being as gay as could be in the
woods, and he was very sad because he knew he had to
kill her. And after a while later the woodsman said,
“Run away, run away, run away quick because I don't
want to kill you." And Snow White was very, very
frightened. Why would the woodsman want to kill her?
But anyway, she ran and she ran and she ran away from
that woodsman. . . .
2. And the next morning when she woke up the oldest dwarf
and the fattest one with the longest beard, named
Happy, said, "Make sure you beware of strangers because
it may be the wicked queen in disguise."
3. And then the wicked queen went down through her secret
door down to her secret cellar, and she mixed up all
these secret potions, and she drank one potion, and it
made her awicked old hag, a very ugly hag, not to
mention that. . . .
The casual version, excerpt 1, has some repetition: "never, ever"
and she ran; but the formal version has considerably more evaluative
elements: as in the first version, she ran is repeated, but so is
162
the command to run away. There are three intensifiers, very, a
comparative in "as gay as could be," and much more dialogue.
In both casual and formal styles, excerpt 2, witch is
modified by wicked, but the formal version also contains details
that furnish the superlative forms: oldest, fattest, longest.
The casual version, excerpt 3, uses pepret_as a modifier
three times, a repetition that heightens the drama of the narrative.
The formal version, in addition to a similar repetition, uses two
intensifiers: pll_and yery, An important element of evaluative
syntax is the double attributive: wicked old hag, a grammatical
feature used much more frequently by sixth graders than by third
graders. The formal style also contains an appositive: "a . . .
hag, a very ugly hag," a construction occurring very rarely in
either third or sixth grade language in this study.
While there is sometimes a point in personal narratives,
just prior to the resolution, where evaluative elements are con-
centrated, evaluation is more likely to be found throughout the
narrative. The fictional narratives in my study have no obvious
evaluation sections, although there are points throughout the nar-
ratives where greater evaluation seems to occur. In Cinderella,
particularly among sixth graders, many evaluative structures occur
in the description of the conflict between Cinderella and her
stepmother/sisters; in Snow White the most evaluation occurs during
the scenes describing the attempts on Snow White's life, particu-
larly in the descriptions of the wicked queen as she plots Snow
163
White's death. A number of illustrative excerpts are provided in
the section above. 1
Interestingly, Labov's study of personal narrative shows
that most often it is the antagonist whose description is the most
21 It is the
syntactically complex and the most highly evaluated.
antagonist who makes the narrative reportable, a point supported
by my data. As discussed earlier, the large number of double
attributives used in the stories are often used in the descriptions
of the antagonists.
The excerpts cited above illustrate the higher degree of
evaluative syntax used by sixth graders, as well as the increase in
such syntax from casual to formal style for both grade levels. Such
examples show that evaluative narrative exists in the vicarious as
well as the personal narrative mode. Obviously both third and sixth
graders felt a stronger obligation to convince the listener/reader
of the worth of the stories in their formal versions. At least to
some degree they were aware of the needs of the audience. The
audience for the casual versions was I-—an adult--one who supposedly
knew the tales already; the story-tellers were not strongly com-
pelled to make the stories reportable. In contrast, the speech
event for the formal version included an eventual audience of other
children who would be reading the stories; the formal situations
demanded that the story-tellers make their stories reportable and
interesting. Sixth graders understood the purposes in more detail
than did the third graders.
164
Discussion of Results
The abstracts and codas used in personal narratives do not
apply to vicarious narratives. The narratives produced by the
students in this study begin with statements that serve to identify
what follows as narrative discourse, and they end with statements
simply signalling the end of the discourse. The "once upon a time"
and the "they lived happily ever after“ statements, or versions
thereof, clearly define the parameters of the narrative and signal
the speaker as having the floor for whatever length of time it takes
to relate the narrative. The major differences were between styles,
with a substantial increase from casual to formal for both grade
levels. It appears that both third and sixth graders recognize the
importance of these narrative elements.
Once the narrator has established his/her responsibility
for narrative transmission and has established the relationship
between him/herself and the audience, it becomes compelling for the
narrator to make the narrative reportable. Even given the fact that
the third and sixth graders in this study were ppkpg_to tell the
stories, this speech event in itself compels them to make the story
reportable and interesting. Devices such as recording the state of
mind of characters, their wishes and emotions, including interesting
and relevant details, and using dialogue add to the reportability of
a story. The compelling nature of vicarious narrative to be report-
able becomes apparent in the increased use of these devices in both
the third and sixth graders' formal versions--for the benefit, one
165
can assume, of the audience who will eventually be reading these
stories. ‘
Similarly, the formal styles at both grade levels produce
the more complex evaluative syntax: the increased use of correla-
tives, comparatives, and explicatives.
While a study of evaluation in narrative does show important
differences between styles, it shows even more dramatically some of
the differences between grade levels in the production of evaluative
narrative. The use of evaluative devices by sixth graders--reporting
interesting details, recording the emotions of characters--increases
over their use by third graders. The most dramatic difference
between third and sixth graders, however, is their use of evaluative
syntax. Sixth graders appear to produce much more of the complex
evaluative syntax than do third graders. This finding suggests a
number of implications about children's varying abilities to handle
discursive structure, along with some implications about the dis-
cursive structure itself.
First, both younger and older children recognize the dramatic
effect of dialogue, interesting details, reports of feelings and emo-
tions of characters. Regardless of age, the students in this study
use these devices for making narratives more worthy of being told.
But the fact that, as I discussed in Chapter IV, the sixth graders
generally developed the conflict and provided better motivation
suggests that older children know more precisely Efl§£§.1" the nar-
rative such details, such reporting of emotions will be most effec-
tive. The older children, I reported earlier, elaborated character
166
and motivation, as evidenced in their superior orientations.t Third
graders, on the other hand, were likely to add details more randomly
without controlling where the details would occur for the most
dramatic effect.
Kernan's study (1977) of the narratives of children of
varying ages substantiates this view. He says:
The younger the child, the more likely it will be that the
understanding and appreciation of the narrative by the
audience will be based upon the narrative events themselves.
The older the child, the more likely it will be that a proper
understanding and appreciation of the narrative will be
assured through the use of contextual and extranarrative
elaboration. The younger children seem to assume that the
communication of the events themselves will result in the
same understanding and appreciation on the part of the
audience that they themselves have. The older children,
on the other hand, realize that the interpretation and
appreciation of the narrative events will depend, at least
in part, upon knowledge that is external to the narrative
events themselves.22
As Kernan suggests, older children's abilities to produce
greater evaluation in narrative may be related to their superior
understanding of speech acts and speech events. Ervin-Tripp and
Mitchell-Kernan (1977) suggest that the age related differences in
the elaboration of certain narrative components may reflect the
developmental changes in the way children adapt their speech to the
23 It is probable that the older
requirements of their audience.
children have a greater awareness that their own assumptions about
motives need to be made explicit; they can more clearly anticipate
the areas that need elaboration and evaluation for the listener.
Situational context in language processing involves more
than just audience awareness. On one hand, audience awareness makes
167
speakers conscious of the need to supply background information,
logical connections, etc. for comprehensibility. On the other hand,
when the speaker is telling a narrative that the listerner obviously
knows, the speaker can assume some major information about the story
on the part of the listener. Harste and Carey (1979) refer to a
study in which better retellings, after oral reading, were obtained
when the readers were asked to retell what they had read to someone
not present during their oral reading of the story. The implication
is that the readers who were recalling the stories were less inclined
to include necessary elements of the narratives when the listener
can be assumed to know the narratives, and more inclined when the
listener cannot be presumed to know the stories. This explanation
may account for the fact that in some cases the narratives told by
the students in my study lacked some of the structural elements one
would expect to find. To what degree did the fact that the students
were telling the stories in my presence affect what they chose to
include? This is a fascinating question that warrants further
investigation.
Older children seem to have the greater control necessary
for producing evaluative syntax that goes beyond basic syntactic
structures. The age-relatedness of increasing syntactic complexity
has long been understood, but the demands of producing more complex
syntax for evaluative purposes make this task of language learning
even more remarkable. The use of comparatives, correlatives, and
explicatives increases with age, it appears from this study, a use
that very subtly increases the evaluation of the narrative as well.
168
Obviously such evaluation demands a higher degree of linguistic
and cognitive skill and at the same time demands a subtle under-
standing of how narrative can most effectively be evaluated. Eval-
uating a narrative by adding more details is not as complex a
process as manipulating the syntax itself for evaluative purposes.
Sixth graders appear to exercise this kind of syntactic elaboration
more effectively than third graders.
Certainly the sixth graders are not all accomplished story-
tellers, but they do appear to surpass the third graders in some
significant ways. Whatever the complex of reasons, it appears that
a major aspect of the development in narrative structure occurs well
after the basic syntax of the language is learned.
FOOTNOTES--CHAPTER V
1Seymour Chatman, "New Ways of Analyzing Narrative Struc-
ture, With an Example from Joyce's Dubliners," Language and Style,
Vol. 2 (1969), 30.
2Seymour Chatman, "The Structure of Narrative Transmission,"
in Style and Structure in Literature: Essays in the New Stylistics,
ed. Roger Fowler (New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 215.
3Keith T. Kernan, "Semantic and Expressive Elaboration in
Children's Narratives," in Child Discourse, ed. Ervin-Tripp and
Mitchell-Kernan (New York: Academic Press, Inc., 1977), p. 93.
4William Labov, "The Transformation of Experience in Nar-
rative Syntax," in Language in the Inner City: Studies in the Black
English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press,
1972), p. 365.
5
Ibid.
61bid., p. 366.
7Labov states that the narratives produced in the Black
English Vernacular demonstrate these evaluative elements to a much
greater degree than the narratives produced by middle-class speakers.
For further discussion of this point, see Labov: "The Transformation
of Experience in Narrative Syntax."
8Arthur N. Applebee, The Child's Conpept of Story (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Pressjf1978), pp. 93-6.
9Labov, p. 369.
10Ibid., p. 375.
11Ibid., p. 375.
12Ibid., p. 378.
'3Ibid., p. 392.
14
Ibid., PP. 378-9.
169
170
15
Ibid., . 381.
16
Ibid., 386.
'7Ibid., 390.
18
"U'O'U'U
Ibid., . 392.
19Ibid.
201bid., p. 394.
2‘Ipid., p. 390.
22Kernan, p. 102.
23Susan Ervin-Tripp and Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, "Introduc-
tion," Child Discourse (New York: Academic Press, Inc., 1977),
p. 16.
CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS
This study of syntactic complexity and discourse structure
in the narratives of third and sixth graders has produced both
expected and unexpected results. My first hypothesis that children
as early as the third grade are gaining control of more than one
register or style in speech production was supported by the data
in general. At both grade levels increases appear from the casual
to formal styles in several elements of syntactic elaboration:
length of clauses, length of T-Units, number of clauses per T-Unit;
use of non-clause modifiers of nouns; number of multi-clause T-Units;
use of passive and inversion constructions; and more formal diction.
A decrease from casual to formal at both grade levels occurs in the
use of coordinating conjunctions initiating T-Units. Certainly the
total effect of these differences between casual and formal oral
styles is one of greater syntactic elaboration in the formal for
both third and sixth graders.
It is obvious, however, that an analysis of syntactic
differences provides a very limited picture of the language of
children. Discussions of quality and effectiveness of language
cannot be based on this kind of analysis alone, but must involve
an analysis of discourse as well. The data on narrative disCourse
171
172
in terms of both story and discursive structure strongly suggest
that third and sixth graders are aware of the narrative demands of
formal narrative structure and audience expectations; formal versions
generally contain greater character motivation, more coherence, more
formal introducers and codas, and greater use of evaluative elements
such as details, thoughts and feelings of characters, and dialogue.
Similarly, the formal styles at both grade levels produce the more
complex evaluative syntax: the increased use of correlatives, com-
paratives, and explicatives. Children, even as young as eight,
intuitively sense the greater stylistic demands of a more formal
speech style in the narrative genre. When the potential audience
is a group other than the interviewer, when their narratives will
be read or heard by other children, third and sixth graders alike
feel compelled to make the story more reportable. The changing
participants, albeit potential, and the changing purpose of the
narrative transmission compel them to modify their narratives in
the direction of greater syntactic complexity, greater narrative
formality, increased reportability and evaluation.
Because these differences between casual and formal oral
styles are so apparent as early as age eight, further study is
warranted on how early, in fact, these stylistic differences
actually begin to occur, and what kinds of differences begin to
occur at what ages. The study of language acquisition must be
more concerned with discourse, with the speech acts and speech
events and the contexts in which they occur. Children cannot be
assumed to be mono-stylistic. Any research or teaching must
I73
account for the child's clear knowledge of stylistic appropriate-
ness. How soon are children aware of the sociolinguistic demands
of varying audiences, purposes, situations in human discourse?
How soon do children begin acquiring a repertoire of styles to meet
the needs of various speech acts and events? And above all, why do
they begin to develop these differences?
In almost all cases, the syntactic features studied increased
slightly in complexity from casual to formal styles. And when one
looks at the totality of differences, the combination of these
features, one sees that the differences between styles is consider-
able.
These differences are important, considering that the speech
event changes from casual to formal only in the sense of its purpose
and of its potential audience. The real, immediate audience is still
the interviewer; the potential audience--other children who will be
hearing/reading the story--is still very remote. That so many dif-
ferences do occur from one speech situation to another emphasizes
the significance of these changes in the speech events. These
syntactic and discursive differences also demonstrate the degree
to which young children are aware of varying speech events and the
linguistic demands placed on them.
The assumption made at the beginning of this study was
that the purposes established for the formal oral narrative would
encourage the kind of syntactic elaboration one would expect to
find in written narratives, but it appears from the data that the
channel of the language event--oral or written--has a greater impact
174
on the language used than does the purpose or ultimate goal. While
the differences between casual and formal oral language were sub-
stantial, they were not as great as I expected them to be. Formal
oral style is still oral discourse, and the channel controls to some
extent the degree of elaboration or complexity produced. Just as
there are differences between casual and formal oral styles, there
also appear to be syntactic differences between formal oral and
written styles, based on a comparison of my data with Hunt's and
O'Donnell's. The comparison suggests that the formal oral style is
one of a repertoire of styles rather than an approximation of
written, as my original hypothesis indicated. The written syntax
of O'Donnell's fifth and seventh graders is more elaborate than the
formal oral syntax produced by the sixth graders in my study. More
study needs to be done on the differences in complexity between
informal oral and formal oral discourse, and between formal oral
and written discourse.
A suggested area for further investigation is a study of
whether the syntactic differences between a formal oral style and
a written style suggested here would be accompanied by differences
in the narrative structure between these two styles. would a written
story be even more tightly structured, well-motivated, well-organized
than a formal oral version of the same narrative? My assumption
would be that the differences would occur across all aspects of
narrative.
To some extent, however, the data show that the relationship
between oral and written language is complex and that the development
175
of syntactic elaboration may vary with the channel (oral or written)
at different grade levels. Third graders' speech appears to be more
syntactically elaborate than their writing, while sixth graders'
written is more syntactically elaborate than their oral. My tenta-
tive conclusion is that third graders are developing syntactic flex-
ibility primarily in oral language and sixth graders in written
language, clearly an idea that offers exciting possibilities for
further research.
Variation in syntactic elaboration relative to age and
channel suggests that development may be guided by the educational
demands; that is, sixth graders might develop in oral language if
the school required it. The fact that the written channel is
emphasized in sixth grade encourages development in that channel
and may indirectly discourage conscious development in the oral
channel.
The study of syntactic complexity must consider differences
in genres. Mike Pope's study suggests that narrative prose is
syntactically less elaborate than expository prose. If this is
true, what is it about narrative structure that differs from
expository structure in terms of syntactic elaboration? Further-
more, are there structural and syntactic differences between personal
and fictional narratives, between personal and expository narratives?
These questions need to be explored.
Another major question raised by this study is that of the
T—Unit as a measure of syntactic complexity. Are there better
measures, and can complexity be described more accurately?
176
As I discussed earlier, the syntactic complexity (based on
T-Unit analysis) of sixth graders is only slightly greater than
that of third graders; for sixth graders the differences are greater
between styles than between grade levels. But the syntactic con-
trol that the sixth graders do exercise can, in some cases, affect
the narrative structure in substantial ways. Crucial elements of
the plot, inadvertently omitted from the narrative, can be included
in the narrative later by embedding them in an adverbial clause or
by using the past perfect construction (discussed in Chapter IV).
Both syntactic devices are used by sixth graders more frequently
than by third graders, who are more likely to disturb the flow of
the plot by throwing in something that should have been included
earlier or by simply omitting any reference to the event whatsoever.
This suggests that certain kinds of syntactic structures can affect
the flow of the story, can make the story smoother, and can help
to make clear what the relationships between elements in the plot
are. And sixth graders are clearly more skillful at using these
syntactic structures for careful narrative development than third
graders.
We find similar results in the use of evaluative syntax by
third and sixth graders. Sixth graders appear to produce much more
of the complex evaluation syntax than third graders do; they have
an increased use of comparatives, correlatives, and explicatives,
all of which help to make a story more interesting, more reportable.
The slight increase that occurs in syntactic complexity from
the third to the sixth graders' narrative is relatively insignificant,
177
but when one looks at the fact that the increases result in more
highly evaluated narratives, it becomes apparent that the quality
cannot be measured by increased complexity so much as by how the
structures affect the narratives as a whole. Sixth graders have a
better command of the syntax in terms of how it will add to the
interest and reportability of the narratives.
The data also suggest that the sixth graders are consider-
ably more capable of controlling other aspects of narrative structure
as well. Sixth graders include more frequently the important events
and scenes; their orientations more clearly motivate subsequent
actions; they establish clearer relationships between episodes; and
their coherence and sequencing are more developed. Certainly sixth
graders' narratives demonstrate a greater control of these narrative
elements over the narratives of third graders.
A major conclusion of this study is that sixth graders have
a more developed sense of audience and understand audience needs.
It appears that older children have an increased awareness of speech
acts and speech events and of how changes in the contexts of language
demand changes in the language itself. The sixth graders' awareness
of audience results in more complete description of motivation,
inclusion of important scenes, more complete orientations, greater
coherence. An interesting phenomenon in this study is that while,
for the most part, sixth graders' use of motivation is more fully
developed than that of the third graders, the sixth graders do
occasionally omit scenes that heighten the conflict. One notable
example is the frequent omission by sixth graders of the prince
I78
trying the glass slipper on Cinderella's stepmother/sisters. In
contrast, many more sixth graders than third graders include the
magic~mirror scene in Snow White, which helps to establish the con-
flict. Why the difference? Possibly sixth graders recognize the
need to establish conflict at the beginning of the stories in either
the orientation or the first episode, which is precisely where the
magic mirror scene occurs at first. The slipper scene in Cinderella,
on the other hand, occurs at the end of the story and is no longer
necessary for understanding the relationship that exists between
Cinderella and her stepmother/sisters because that was established
earlier in the story. It appears that sixth graders are more keenly
aware of whgg_the scenes are crucial. They are more aware of
audience in speech events and recognize the need for motivation
early in the narratives.
Implications
The results of the differences between casual and formal
styles and between third and sixth graders in their narrative dis-
course suggest several implications for the classroom. One is that
syntactic analysis alone offers only a partial view of changes that
occur in varying language events and that the limitations of syntac-
tic measuring instruments interfere with even that discussion.
Differences between styles and between grade levels become sub-
stantial when syntactic changes were analyzed along with changes
in narrative elements and structure. Changes in syntax effect
179
changes in narrative structure. A full analysis must include both
aspects of language prduction. ‘
It is also obvious from this study that viewing language
use apart from the situational context in which it occurs is very
limiting. Speech act theory must be central to any kind of analysis
of children's oral or written language and must be incorporated in
classroom instruction in language arts. Teachers need to recognize
that children as early as age eight already sense differences
between styles of language and between channels of language. Beyond
that, children have the ability to make discernible changes in
syntax and in narrative structure from one speech style to another.
This kind of flexibility in language needs to be fostered, encouraged,
provided for in the classroom. Such flexibility occurs and is
acquired quite naturally as situations arise that demand this kind
of flexibility. Providing real audiences, providing language exper-
iences for various speech events, and providing a wealth of practice
in speaking and writing styles will help children gain control of
language variation in as natural a way as possible. It is important
that such language activities occur in natural contexts, for it is
normal discourse in a wide range of speech events that provides this
kind of awareness in children probably long before formal education
begins.
The speech event that the students in this study partici-
pated in was unusual; the goal was not immediate, i.e., the students
were not seeing their words turn into print immediately, nor were
they speaking to their real audience. The goal, then, was less
I80
tangible than a normal conversation. This suggests that many
language interactions analyzed in the classroom have an artificial
quality, including the use of written language in the classroom.
A problem with many writing assignments is that the ultimate goal
may be one thing, but the channel of communication may dictate
another. The difficulty with getting students to write as they
speak, freely and spontaneously, may be attributed to the fact that
they are using a different channel of communication. This is not
to suggest that this kind of goal in writing has no value but rather
to suggest a possible explanation of why this kind of goal in writing
is difficult to achieve. Writing, even to young children, will be
more than simply "speech written down." Writing is a more formal
channel, in most cases, and places demands on syntax and structure
different from those in oral language. The repertoire of styles
that children begin to acquire includes not only casual and formal
oral styles but spoken and written styles as well. Further study
needs to be done on just what the linguistic and narrative differ-
ences are between each of these styles.
Linguists have long recognized that older children's
language will be more mature than younger children's language.
The studies of Carol Chomsky, Paula Menyuk, and others strongly
support this. But in addition, discourse analysis of children's
narratives strongly suggests that older children have better con-
trol of narrative structure than younger children do. It is
important for teachers to recognize the full extent of children's
language abilities in order to have realistic expectations of
181
children's ability to produce coherent, well-motivated narratives.
Because this study was limited in scope and in the number of stu-
dents-studied, it is important that this topic be investigated
more thoroughly.
Teachers must also consider the possibility suggested in
this study that children acquire syntactic flexibility in different
channels of language at different ages. Older children have a
greater control of a repertoire of styles ranging from informal
oral to formal oral to written. Flexibility for younger children
appears to be in the oral channel, on the other hand. Although it
is possible that emphasis on writing in sixth grade has fostered
sixth graders' writing development, the extent to which development
in either speech or writing can be forced is questionable. Teachers
should be encouraged to provide ample opportunities for both language
processes to be used so that natural growth and development can occur
in speech as well as in writing.
A study of this nature is clearly only a beginning, but it
undoubtedly establishes the fact of language flexibility among
younger and older children both. Language learning is a remarkable
feat, made more remarkable by the fact that syntactic flexibility can
affect narrative structure, and in fact, is inextricably bound with
the overall discourse structure of the narrative. Language flexi-
bility, then, goes far beyond a simple elaboration or complexity
of syntax and obviously is acquired long after the basic syntax of
the language is learned. This study adds to the small store of
information we have on language learning after the crucial early
182
years and clearly establishes that the acquisition of language in
later years is related to the contextual demands of language.'
Language study can no longer be limited to simple syntactic studies
but must include discourse and the context in which it is used and
modified. I hope that this study aids the understanding of children's
awareness of the context of language and their ability to control
language in varying speech situations.
. and they lived happily ever after.
183
APPENDIX
SAMPLE NARRATIVES
184
APPENDIX
SAMPLE NARRATIVES
The following narratives, three from each grade level, are
representative of the narratives told by the students in this study.
I arbitrarily included punctuation and capitalization for making the
reading easier. The punctuation that I included was based on the
intonation patterns of the speakers. The inclusion of punctuation
in no way affects T-Unit analysis because such analysis is based on
clauses rather than on terminal punctuation.
I85
I86
Third Grade: Tammy, Informal
Cinderella was a girl and she was a slave and one night she
wanted to go to a ball but she couldn't because she didn't have no
clothes or nothing else so she couldn't go. And some mice and some
more of her friends they made her a dress and she got to go. And
she didn't have nothing to go in. And then she saw a fairy and she
turned some pumpkins into a "coach" and she made some horses and
slippers and she made all beautiful and she got to go. And at
twelve o'clock she knew what time that she was supposed to be but
she was too busy dancing with the prince and she wasn't paying
attention to the clock. At twelve o'clock she ran out and she left
her slipper there and everything turned back. Her clothes were all
rags again. And then there was this man who went around to all of
the houses to see if the slipper fitted anyone and he went to her
house and her stepsisters--it wouldn't fit them. They tried to
squeeze their foot in but it still wouldn't go in. And then he
asked if there was anyone else in the house and they said, "Yes,
there's only a slave." And he told them to bring her down and have
her try on the slipper and it fit Cinderella and she was the princess.
187
Third Grade: Tammy, Formal
Once upon a time there was this girl who was a maid for her
three~stepsisters and her stepmother. And she lived with her. And
one night there was going to be a ball and Cinderella wanted to go
but she didn't have nothing to wear. She only had rags. Then she
saw a fairy and she came and she turned some pumpkins into a couch
and she changed some mice into horses and she gave Cinderella a
beautiful dress. And after she done that then she told Cinderella
she had to be back at twelve o'clock and Cinderella went to the ball
happily and then when she was too busy dancing with the prince and
then the clock struck twelve o'clock she had run out and she was on
her way down the steps she turned into a rag. She left one of her
shoes behind. Then the prince told this guy to go and find--to go
in every house and see whose foot would fit into it. He went to
every house. Nobody's foot fit into it until he came to Cinderella's
house. And after he came to Cinderella's house he tried it on all
the stepsisters and the stepmother. They tried to squeeze their
foot in, but they couldn't put it in and then they asked if anyone
else was in the house and he said no that there wasn't except the
maid and he said to bring the maid down. And Cinderella came down
and her foot fit the shoe just perfectly and she got married to the
prince and lived happily ever after.
188
Third Grade: Lisa, Informal
Snow White lived with her mother and her mother didn't want
her. And she fell asleep. And she told the hunter to take Snow
White out to the woods and kill her to get her heart. The hunter
didn't want to, so instead he killed a deer and got its heart. He
brought it back to the queen and the queen said, "Ah, that's not Snow
White's heart," and so she got mad and told the hunter to go out and
really kill Snow White. And he couldn't find her because she was out
in the woods and got lost. And so after she had got lost in the
woods, she fell asleep, and when she got up in the morning and finally
found her way through the woods, and then she found a cottage. And
she knocked on the door and nobody was at home. So she opened the
door and looked in, and there wasn't anybody home. Nobody said
anything. So she went in and went upstairs. First she cleaned it
up. Then she went upstairs and fell asleep on all the beds. And
then she heard the door open and then came the seven dwarfs in the
house and saw that somebody had been there, so they went upstairs
and went to the bedroom and saw that Snow White was in their bed,
so they ran downstairs and they were really scared and then they
went back upstairs and Snow White was awake. 50 Snow White went
downstairs and fixed them some breakfast and then she told them to
wash their hands before breakfast or they couldn't eat, so they all
went upstairs to wash their hands and face and then they ate. Then
this old woman came to the seven dwarfs' door and gave Snow White a
poisoned apple and she took a bite out of it and she fell to the
floor. And then a prince came along and she was out in a casket,
l89
and he opened it up and kissed her and she came awake and they lived
happily ever after.
l90
Third Grade: Lisa, Formal
Snow White went into her room and her mother called her.
And she wanted for the hunter to take Snow White out into the woods
to kill her to get her heart. Instead, he didn't want to kill her,
so he killed a deer and got its heart. And when he went back to the
castle he gave the heart to the queen and the queen said, "Oh, that's
not Snow White's heart," and she told the hunter to go back out in
the woods and really kill Snow White, and he couldn't so he killed
something else and got its heart and took it back to the queen and
it fooled the queen and she thought it was Snow White's heart. And
then she got lost out in the woods and she was sad because she
couldn't find her way back home. So then she fell asleep and in the
morning she got up and started walking around and then she came to
a cottage. And when she saw the cottage, she went into the cottage
and said, "Is anyone home?" Nobody answered so she looked around
and cleaned the cottage up, because it was really dirty. And then
she went upstairs and cleaned it up and then she took all the dust
downstairs and threw it outside. And then she ran back upstairs
and fell asleep on all the dwarfs' beds. Then when the dwarfs got
home, they found that somebody had cleaned it up, so they went
upstairs with a flashlight and looked in all of the rooms. They
couldn't find anyone, so they looked in the one room and found that
Snow White was there. And then they woke up Snow White and she went
downstairs and told them to go upstairs and go to sleep and she'd
start cooking breakfast for in the morning. And the dwarfs said,
"Okay," and then they went upstairs and fell asleep and then when
191
morning came their breakfast was already on the table and Snow White
was sitting in the chair over in the corner. And when she sat down,
first-she told them to wash their hands and wash their face, and
they said, "Oh, shoot," because they didn't want to wash their face
and hands. And when they did they ate breakfast. Then they went
back to take a little nap. And then they went back upstairs and
went to sleep. And a lady came to the door and said to Snow White,
"Would you like to buy an apple?" And Snow White said "Yes." And
then she took an apple and she went inside and shined it up more
and she took a bite out of it and it was a poisoned apple and then
she fell to the floor. And then the dwarfs came back downstairs
and saw that she was dead and they took her out to the casket. And
then the prince came and kissed her and then she woke up and they
lived happily ever after.
192
Third Grade: Connie, Informal
Once there was a queen who wanted a beautiful person like
her. ‘Finally one day she had a little kid and it was a girl and it
was beautifuler than her. And then one day about fourteen or fifteen
years old she asked one of her guards to go out into the woods and
cut out her heart, and then the guard couldn't do it so he went and
left her in the woods. And then the seven dwarfs find her and they
take her in. And this queen asks, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who's
the prettiest girl of all?" And it says "Snow White." And then she
goes and finds where Snow White is and gives her this poisoned apple
and then Snow White doesn't die because the dwarfs come back in time.
And then she gives her a blanket and squeezes and then they come home
and then the queen puts something in her and makes her go to sleep.
And then the prince comes along and kisses her and then she wakes up
and they get married.
193
Third Grade: Connie, Formal
Once upon a time there was a lady who wanted a little baby
who was as beautiful as her. She had one one day and it was
beautifuler than her and she was jealous so she told one of her
soldiers to go out into the woods and cut her heart out. One of the
soldiers couldn't do it, so he just left her in the woods. And the
seven dwarfs came and took her to their house and then she was cook-
ing for them and everything and made their beds and stuff. And one
day the mother asked her mirror and said, "Mirror, mirror on the
wall, Who's the prettiest girl of all?" And it said "Snow White.“
She said, "I thought Snow White was dead." So she went to the place
where Snow White was staying and gave her a poisoned apple. Then
the dwarfs came and saved her. Then she said, "Mirror, mirror on
the wall, "Who's the prettiest girl of all?" And it said, "Snow
White." And then she went over to their house again and she gave
her a scarf and said, "Oh, let me tighten it for you." And she
squeezed and strangled Snow White but Snow White returned from that.
Then she made up as a little old lady and then they played dunk-the-
apple game and then she said, "Let's ask Snow White to eat this one"
and pushed it over for Snow White. And then Snow White fell down
and fell in a deep sleep and a princess [sic] came and kissed her
and woke her up and then they got married.
194
Sixth Grade: Charlie May, Informal
Cinderella and her stepsisters they were going to this ball
and she asked them could she go and she said, "No, you look too
funny," and so she started crying. And then her fairy godmother
came and told her not to cry. She had this magic wand stick and
she made her a ? and a dress and everything and some glass slippers
and she turned a pumpkin into a coach and there were three mice and
she turned them into some horses and then they went to the ball and
she told her to be back at twelve o'clock sharp. If she wouldn't
come back at twelve o'clock the coach would change back, and so she
went there and her stepsisters was wondering who was she so she
started dancing with the princess [sic] and so he told his mother
and his father than he had found a girl and when twelve o'clock came
she had to go so she ran down the stairs and she lost one of her
slippers and so he found it and he told a man to go look for it and
so he went to everybody's house to try on the glass slipper and he
went to Cinderella's house and they had her locked up in this room
and they was trying on this slipper and one of their foot was too
big and the other one was too small and one knee was cracked and
stuff like that and he heard her cough and he opened the door and
she came out and he tried on this slipper and she turned into this
pretty girl.
195
Sixth Grade: Charlie May,_Formal
Once upon a time there was three stepsisters with Cinderella
and they were going to the ball and then they all announced, "Let's
go to the ball, let's go to the ball," and Cinderella was talking
about how she wanted to go to the ball. So they said, "You funny
thing." And she said, "I'm not funny-looking." And they started
laughing at her, and they said, "Come here and help me zip up this
dress. Come, here, come help me do this. Wash them floors. You're
going to stay here and do the chores." And so then they left and
she started going over there by the fireplace, and she started cry-
ing, and then her fairy godmother came and said, "Don't cry. I'll
fix you up." And so she changed her into a pretty girl and there
was three white mouse and she changed them into white horses and a
pumpkin she changed that into a coach. And she told her she got to
be back at twelve o'clock sharp and so she went to the ball. She
was running up the stairs and she was dancing with him and her step-
sisters were wondering who was that pretty girl who was dancing in
there. When twelve o'clock came she had to go so she ran down the
stairs and her glass slipper came off. And the prince said, "I want
that girl. That girl is for me." And so he went to go get a man
that helped him to look for and so they went to people houses trying
on the glass slipper. And they had locked Cinderella in this closet
and when he was in this house she sneezed and they was trying on the
shoe and one of the stepsisters foot was too big and the other one
was too small and the other one was too big too. And so the prince
unlocked the door for Cinderella and she came out and when she
196
fitted the glass slipper on she changed back into a (?) And then
he said, "This is the one," and they left.
197
Sixth Grade: Carol, Informal
A long, long time ago a queen had a baby and named it Snow
White. And then that queen died and the king married another queen
and this queen was wicked and everything. And every morning the
wicked queen would go to her mirror and ask who was the fairest of
all. And the mirror would say, "You are the fairest of all," and
all this. And then one day he said, "You are no longer the fairest
of all. Snow White is." And so she got upset and wanted Snow White
put away, so she called her huntsman, and her huntsman took her away
and took her into the woods but she was so beautiful that the hunts-
man didn't want to kill her, so he just left her in the forest and
then he went back to the queen and told her that he had killed her.
And then the next morning the queen again asked the mirror who was
the fairest of all, and the mirror said that Snow White was still
the fairest of all because the huntsman hadn't killed her. But then
she goes to this house and she walks in and she sees seven little
beds, seven little everythings, and then she's sleepy after being
in the woods, so then she lays down for a rest. And then the dwarfs
come in and see her laying there and they wonder who she is, and then
finally she wakes up and she tells them everything that happened.
50 they say she can live with them as long as she cleans the house
and stuff, so then the wicked stepmother finds all this out. And
then she dresses up as an old lady and takes a poisoned apple to
Snow White's house while the dwarfs are gone off to work, and they
work in the mines. And so she says she can't let her in because
the dwarfs said that she couldn't let anybody into their house or
198
anything, so the old lady says, "Well, I'll give you an apple,"
and she cuts it in half and gives it to Snow White, and Show White
eats the apple and falls flat on the floor and then when the seven
dwarfs come back they think that she's dead, but she's only asleep
and so they put her on this bed thing outdoors and they just leave
her out there for awhile and they're crying and everything, and
finally this prince comes along and really thinks she's gorgeous
and all this stuff and decides to kiss her and he kisses her and
she wakes up and they live happily ever and they ride off on his
white pony.
199
Sixth Grade: Carol, Formal
Once upon a time there was a queen and she was sitting at
her window sewing one day and she chanced to prick herself and a few
drops of blood fell onto the snow, and she said that her child's
hair would be as dark as the window pane, and her lips should be as
red as blood, and she would call her Snow White. And so then she
had this child, and then she died. And then the king married another
lady, and this lady was kind of a witch, and every morning she'd go
to her mirror and say, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, "Who's the fair-
est of them all?‘' And so one morning she said this, and the mirror,
instead of saying, "You are the fairest of all," the mirror said,
"Snow White is the fairest of all." And so the queen wanted to know
who Snow White was and everything, and so she called the huntsman,
and the huntsman told her who it was, and she said, "Okay. Take
Snow White into the woods and kill her." So the huntsman took Snow
White into the woods and she was so beautiful that he couldn't kill
her, so he just left her there in the woods. And finally she went
into this house, and when she walked in, it had a table with seven
little chairs and seven little plates and seven little cups, and
then she went upstairs and there were seven little beds with names
on them, and then she was so sleepy that she decided to go to sleep.
So she laid down on one of the beds. It just so happened to be
Sneezy's. And so then when the seven dwarfs came home, they ate and
they went up to put on their pajames and go to bed, and they went
upstairs and they found Snow White there. And they woke her up and
she said that she was scared and everything, and they said, "Well,
200
we won't hurt you," and all this stuff. So then she told them
about the wicked queen and all this stuff, and then they said that
she could live there if Snow White did all of their cleaning and
everything and did all of the housework and stuff, and so she said
"Okay," and then they all went to sleep. Then the next morning the
queen went to her mirror and said, "Mirror, mirror on the wall, Who's
the fairest of them all?" And the mirror said, “Snow White is still
the fairest of them all." And so she got really mad and so then she
went to the dungeon and she started making a potion and stuff. Mean-
while back at the seven dwarfs' house Snow White was packing their
lunches and everything and sent them off, and they were all leaving
out the door, and before she left out the door, they said, "Don't
let anyone in and close the door and lock it up tight and everything,"
and she said, "Okay," and so then they left. And then back at the
castle the queen had made herself look like an old lady and then she
made a poisoned apple, and then she set out for the forest and she
found the house of the seven dwarfs, and she knocked at the door and
everything. Snow White just looked out of a little window upstairs
and said, "I'm sorry I can't let you in." And the queen said, "Well,
just take half of my apple anyway," so she cut off half of it and
gave it to Snow White. Snow White took a bite and fell dead to the
floor. At least everybody thought she was dead, but she was really
supposed to be asleep. Then the witch left, and then the dwarfs
came back and they find her on the floor and so then they pick her
up and they take her outdoors and they put her on this little bed.
and then they're all crying and everything and then this prince
201
happens along--a real durky prince, you know--he gets lost in this
woods. He doesn't know where he's going, really weird, but he was
very handsome, but the dumb, cute type. He saw the princess and he
said, "Well, I guess I'll kiss her, anyway she's so beautiful," and
all this stuff. So he knelt down and kissed her and then she woke
up and then they ride off on their pony and they lived happily ever
after.
202
Sixth Grade: Laura, Informal
Once upon a time there was this man and his daughter and
then his wife died and he got married again to this old lady that
had two daughters. And then he died, and this lady and her
daughters was real mean to her. And then one day the prince came
and said that there was going to be a ball and everyone was invited.
And they were going to go, and Cinderella said she wanted to go,
but they wouldn't let her. And then they went to the ball, and she
was crying because she wanted to go and her fairy godmother came and
let her go and she said that she had to be back by twelve o'clock
because she would be ugly again. And so she got to go to the ball
and she danced with the prince. And she lost her glass shoe when
she was running and he wanted to marry her so his messengers went
to look for the girl who the shoe would fit. And then they found
her and then they got married.
203
Sixth Grade: Laura, Formal _
Once upon a time there was a rich father, and he had a
daughter named Cinderella. And when his wife died, he got married
to this old lady that had two daughters. And then when he died,
they all lived in the castle. Well, they always made her sleep in
the attic and stuff and they made her do all the work. And then
one night the prince came, and he said that everybody could go to
the ball, and she wanted to go, but they wouldn't let her because
she had work to do, and she didn't have any good clothes. So she
couldn't go. And then that night she started to cry because she
couldn't go to the ball. The prince said who he likes he's going
to marry. And so she wanted to go even more. So they were at the
ball. And her fairy godmother came and she told her that she could
go, and she made her pretty and everything. And then she was at
the ball, and he left everybody to dance with her. And then that
night at the stroke of midnight she started to leave, and she was
running down the steps, and she lost her shoe. And then he said
he wanted to marry her, and so they went out searching for the girl
who the shoe fit, and they found her, and that was the end.
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204
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