The enunciative punctuation and the configuration of narrative instances in children’s news

ABSTRACT

In this paper, based on the interactionism in Language Acquisition proposed by De Lemos (1997, 1999, 2001), we investigate the use of enunciative signs of punctuation (Dahlet 2006) on news produced by a girl, trying to highlight their role in the configuration of narrative instances. The corpus consists of 17 news produced from 7 to 10 years old at school and home environment and all the analysis is mainly qualitative. The results show that many instances of enunciative punctuation indicate the presence of the interlocutor in the saying of the child and her return on her own saying. We relate this listening position to the narrator and the author configuration.

Key-words:
language acquisition; interactionism; punctuation; narrative instances