This paper analyses 5 mini-corpora of spontaneous written production of 8/9-year-old children (3 girls and 2 boys). Collected through a year of assigned school-work. It takes into consideration three discourse features of supposedly immature writers: the prevalent use of paratactics, supposed inconsistency in conscutio temporum and massive use of referential expressions as discourse anaphors. These phenomena are also shown to be present in Old Italian texts, supporting the hypothesis that children just miss "sufficient exposure to written Italian, somewhat parallel to the situation of the first authors who used this language in writing literature.
L'italiano delle origini e le origini dell'italiano scritto
GIUSTI, Giuliana
2004-01-01
Abstract
This paper analyses 5 mini-corpora of spontaneous written production of 8/9-year-old children (3 girls and 2 boys). Collected through a year of assigned school-work. It takes into consideration three discourse features of supposedly immature writers: the prevalent use of paratactics, supposed inconsistency in conscutio temporum and massive use of referential expressions as discourse anaphors. These phenomena are also shown to be present in Old Italian texts, supporting the hypothesis that children just miss "sufficient exposure to written Italian, somewhat parallel to the situation of the first authors who used this language in writing literature.I documenti in ARCA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.