Possessive relations uttered in narrative by monolingual Croatian speaking and English speaking children

Abstract: As a part of a child’s everyday communication, narrative provides a wide linguistic context, evaluating isolated words and clauses. This type of discourse requires children to combine words and sentences for a specific purpose. Narrative gives insight into how successful children are in using their communicative linguistic skills. Unlike conversing, storytelling strives to decontextualization which changes the inner organization of narrative. Children’s ability to narrate and create the structures of stories has been thoroughly explored in contemporary literature, whereas the less explored aspect is the aspect of narrative which describes referential cohesion and the usage of referential expressions telling about animate characters (a boy, a dog), objects (a tree, a jar) and about other entities (family, home). The paper investigates the way children, speakers of typologically different languages, process the notion of possession cognitively and linguistically. Both internal (attributive and predicative) and external possession is observed. The aim of the paper is to identify possessive relations that are expressed in children's language as well as the means of expressing them. It is assumed that four-year- olds percieve prototypical possessive relations and utter them using relatively simple, grammatically and semantically prototypical expressions. On the other hand, ten-year-olds are expected to use more complex constructions and perceive more diverse relations between a possessors and a posessee. Comparing the utterances crosslinguistically, children speaking Croatian, a morphologically more complex language, are expected to aquire linguistic means for expressing possession at a later age.