Relating Events in Narrative: A Case Study of Romanian

This book is the published version of the author's
doctoral dissertation. It is an attempt at revealing
only a small part of the problem of the fascinating
problem of how children acquire their first language.
The focus is on the use of tense and aspect on the
one hand, and of connectors on the other, for the
purpose of constructing a coherent and cohesive
narrative, showing, where possible, how and why
Romanian children differ from other children
acquiring other mother tongues. The study is based
on a corpus of 47 narratives elicited from Romanian
monolingual subjects of different age groups, all
stories being constructed on the basis of the same
picture book with no written text. The data thus
gathered were analyzed with the aim of tracing a
developmental path from one age to another both with
respect to the macro-linguistic (knowledge of
narrative organization) and to the micro-linguistic
knowledge (i. e. knowledge of the two domains of
grammar mentioned above). This area of investigation
represents only a minor contribution to the
uncovering of the discourse processes involved in the making of the child s grammar.