Discourse Markers in Narrative of Bilingual Russian-Hebrew speaking pre-school children

Abstract

This thesis examines the use of Discourse Markers (DMs) in narratives of bilingual Russian-Hebrew children. Fifty-four pre-school children told three narratives in L1/Russian and L2/Hebrew (two familiar narratives: Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks plus one unfamiliar narrative: Cat and Fox). A tripartite taxonomy is suggested for the analysis of DMs based on the forms, features, and domains in which they function: (1) Discourse connectives (DCs) functioning at the level of the discourse structural domain; (2) Fluency Markers (FMs) serving functions in the social domain; (3) Pragmatic Markers (PMs) adding an additional layer of attitudinal information that the speaker intends to convey to the listener and functioning in the social and metalinguistic domain. The results show that there are cross-linguistic differences in the use of DMs. Children had higher densities in all three types of DMs (DCs, FMs and PMs) in L1/Russian along with a richer variation of DCs and PMs in L1/ Russian. It was also found that a stimulus familiarity factor influenced the children‘s use of DMs. This could be seen in the increased density of all three types of DMs (DCs, FMs and PMs) in the unfamiliar narrative in comparison with the two familiar narratives. Proficiency levels were shown to account for the density of DMs with less proficient speakers of L2/Hebrew producing a higher density of DCs and FMs. The thesis argues that the increased density of DMs is ascribed to production problems rather than pragmatic shifting in language dominance as it has been previously reported for adult discourse by Sankoff et al. (1997), Matras (2000), Muller (2005) and Buysse (2010).

Date of Award	2011
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	Bar-Ilan University
Supervisor	Joel Walters (Supervisor)