THE ORGANISATION OF NARRATIVE DISCOURSE: ANAPHORA AND COHESION IN CHILDREN’S NARRATION

Abstract: The paper describes the development of children’s narrative ability by analysing the use of anaphora as a means of creating cohesive discourse. Our study seeks to establish whether the pronouns and ellipses used by 4- and 10-year olds are co-referential with their antecedents, at what age co-referential relations start to manifest within a sentence, and what type of co-referential relations is the most prevalent one. The results have confirmed our hypotheses that children under the age of six do not use their pronouns and ellipses co-referentially with their antecedents, that the presence of co-referential links within a sentence increases with age, and that the dominant type of co-referential relations is subject-subject.