世新大學圖書館

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 58-08, Section: B, page: 4491.

Chair: DAN I. SLOBIN.

Thesis (PH.D.)--UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, 1997.

This dissertation combines ethnographic and discourse analytic methods in studying conversational and picture-prompted extended discourse productions of Turkish preschool children. The first part characterizes the story-occasioning situations and conversations that surround the children's spontaneous narratives. The second part presents a linguistic analysis of strategies used for introducing story characters in the naturalistic and elicited narratives. The third part focuses on the role of conversational functions of narratives with regard to the sequential organization of discourse, specifically with respect to how stories are brought to a resolution.

The data were collected in two Istanbul preschools from children of 3 to 6 years of age. The naturalistic extended discourse segments were collected by visiting each of the two preschools for two or three days a week over a period two and a half months and recording various organized and free-time activities. The picture-based narratives were elicited from the same set of children on the basis of two separate picture-series prompts, using a "naive listener" procedure.

In the first part, the contexts in which conversational stories occur are classified with regard to features of the social and physical environment and the ongoing conversation. It was found that various structural features of discourse serve storytellers' rhetorical purposes and/or respond to the audience's interactive goals.

In the second part, comparison between picture-prompted and conversational discourse reveals the use of different linguistic devices offered by the language, with the use of more explicit ways of introducing characters in conversational contexts. It is concluded that construction type, characteristics of referential entity, and different pressures exerted by different discourse contexts influence how character-introduction is carried out by Turkish children.

In the third part, the observed conversational stories were classified according to whether or not they feature a resolution and how they are organized with respect to temporal sequentiality. It was found that resolution and temporal sequencing are not inherent features of the narrative genre, but are highly dependent on the production contexts of stories.

School code: 0028.