Referential features of narrative genres in the process of language acquisition

Abstract

The paper regards the process of the development of several features of the narrative speech genre in the discourse field of Russian culture while learning Russian as a second language. Referentiality in general linguistic sense is an area concerning naming of objects and characters by language means. In this paper we analyse the problems of the referential choice (what factors influence the speaker’s choice of a referential expression) and anaphora resolution (how the listener/reader binds an anaphoric pronoun to a coreferential noun phrase). The main goal of our paper is to study referential features of narratives produced by foreign students acquiring Russian as a second language (RSL), compared with adult Russian speakers and children acquiring Russian as a first language (RFL). Also, we describe referential mistakes made by RSL learners. The analysis of the data demonstrates that the main referential features (abilities to make the right referential choices, form anaphoric chains, etc.) are related to the age-specific cognitive development and do not depend on the native language. Both groups of adults show similar patterns in using nouns and pronouns for the introduction or reintroduction of a referent and for the topic maintenance, and build continuous anaphoric chains. Particular anaphoric mistakes of RSL learners are related to the level of their grammar skills and differ from the mistakes made by RFL children: while children’s mistakes base on the cognitive factor, RSL students’ mistakes are mostly grammatical.

Keywords

• narrative
• reference
• anaphora
• language acquisition
• second language acquisition
• russian language