Direct discourse and hyposegmentation in children’s writing

Abstract

This paper aims at discussing two main objectives from a research study. On the one hand, it intends to investigate if the presence of direct discourse in children’s textual productions would influence the occurrence of hyposegmentation – segmentation which is beyond those provided by orthographic conventions, such as “abruxa” ("thewitch"). On the other hand, this work also questions the quality of those hyposegmentations, as an attempt to explore the possible differences among hyposegmentations, considering the enunciative position where they come from. These enunciative positions can be: direct discourse (DD) and other contexts (OC). The corpus of this research is made up of 65 narratives written by 65 second graders of Elementary School. The analysis of the hyposegmentations identified in this corpus allowed us to notice that the enunciative position where children place themselves to narrate/write (DD and OC) has a significant role in the occurrence of hyposegmentations in children’s writing. In some cases, this enunciative position determines the kind of hyposegmentation which may or may not emerge. Based on the results− and considering that hyposegmentations represent clues of the paths followed by children in order to understand what “word” is, as it is defined by orthographic conventions−, we could predict that the way children are affected by what they understand as word is also influenced by the enunciative position children assume when they narrate/write