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This book is a study of the ways in which language continues to develop after the age of three, after the child masters the complete sentence. The authors collected over 1000 narratives about personal experience produced by almost a hundred children ranging in age from 3½ to 9½ years. These narratives were then submitted to three different analyses of discourse structure. The first looks at the emotional as well as the referential content of narratives, viewing narratives as organized around emotional high points. The second is a story grammar analysis, which views narratives as organized around the formation and execution of goals by protagonists. Whereas the first two analyses are primarily semantic, the third analysis is syntactic. It looks at the ways in which some propositions in a discourse depend upon prior propositions. Passages of discourse are considered to be organized as syntactic hierarchies of dependent propositions. Each system delineates some part of the progress of children as they mature from 4 to 9 years and perfect the structuring of discourse.

This book is unique in including details and examples of these three types of linguistic analyses of discourse and a detailed comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of each system. We include scoring manuals and many graphs of the applications of each type of analysis. The book could be used by researchers as a consumer’s guide to linguistic analyses or by linguists, psycholinguists, and educators as a training manual in the analysis of discourse. We have included verbatim transcripts of over 70 of the narratives, so people interested in devising their own analyses may find …