Relating Events in Narrative: A Case Study of Romanian

This book is the published version of the author'sdoctoral dissertation. It is an attempt at revealingonly a small part of the problem of the fascinatingproblem of how children acquire their first language.The focus is on the use of tense and aspect on theone hand, and of connectors on the other, for thepurpose of constructing a coherent and cohesivenarrative,showing, where possible, how and whyRomanian children differ from other childrenacquiring other mother tongues. The study is basedon a corpus of 47 narratives elicited from Romanianmonolingual subjects of different age groups, allstories being constructed on the basis of the samepicture book with no written text. The data thusgathered were analyzed with the aim of tracing adevelopmental path from one age to another both withrespect to the macro-linguistic (knowledge ofnarrative organization) and to the micro-linguisticknowledge (i.e. knowledge of the two domains ofgrammar mentioned above). This area of investigationrepresents only a minor contribution to theuncovering of the discourse processes involved in the'making' of the child's grammar.