Control and use of pronouns in thewriting of native American children.

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Authors Gespass, Suzanne Ruth.

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Control and use of pronouns in the writing of native American children

Gespass, Suzanne Ruth, Ph.D.

The University of Arizona, 1989

Copyright @1989 by Gespass, Suzanne Ruth. All rights reserved.

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U·M·I

CONTROL AND USE OF PRONOUNS IN THE WRITING

OF NATIVE AMERICAN CHILDREN

by

Suzanne Ruth Gespass

Copyright ~ Suzanne Ruth Gespass 1989

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DIVISION OF TEACHING AND TEACHER EDUCATION

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WITH A MAJOR IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

1 9 8 9

1

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

2

As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read

the dissertation prepared by Suzanne Ruth Gespass --------------~----------------------------

entitled CONTROL AND USE OF PRONOUNS IN THE WRITING OF NATIVE

AMERICAN CHILDREN

and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement

for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy ------------------~~---------------------------------

3/24/89

Ken~1lod7 I. . tL V(~~

Date

3/24/89 etta Goodman

(6~(~ Date

3/24/89 Carol Larson Date

Date

Date

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

3/24/89 Dissertation Director Kenneth Goodman Date

STATEMENT OF AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgement of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder.

SIGNED: ~ It ¥fS

3

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Ken and Yetta Goodman for their guidance, patience, and long-term belief in me. Little did I know when I first came to Tucson nearly ten years ago that they would become for me such symbols of integrity and uncompromising principles. They are true mentors to me. I want to thank them also for their warmth and friendship and their remarkable ability to incorporate their students nat only into an intellectual community, but into their family as well.

I would like to thank Carol Larson for her on-going support, helpful suggestions, and goad humor.

I would also like to thank my parents, Norma and Milton Gespass, who have always supported me in whatever I have chosen to do.

I want to say thanks to my many friends, all of wham have encouraged me when I needed it.

I would like to thank Linda Clark for her efficient typing and for her determination and persistence in overcoming the quirkiness of the new printer.

And finally, this dissertation could never have been completed without the love and support of my husband, David Dobkin. He always believed that I would finish even though at times I didn't believe it myself. I thank him for knowing when to push and when to back off. I want to thank him also for his computer assistance and especially for taking over the care of our family for the months it took me to finish writing.

This study is dedicated to my daughters, Sarah Emily and Jane Beatrice.

4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

LIST OF TABLES .....

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ..

ABSTRACT . . . .

CHAPTER 1. REFERENT ASSIGNMENT FROM THE POINT

7

8

9

OF VIEW OF THE WRITERS ........... 11

. CHAPTER 2. REVIEW

CHAPTER 3. DESIGN

Statement of the Problem. .13 Background of the Study .14 Purpose of the Study. .22 Objective of the Study. .23 Significane of the Study. .25

Reference in Writing .25 Minority Students. .26 Need for Theory. .26

OF THE LITERATURE .28

The Evolution of Text Analysis and The Nature of Text. .28

Cohesion. .34 Coherence .39 Defining Reference. .41 Pronouns. . .47 The Comprehension of Anaphoric

Pronouns. .53

OF THE STUDY. .79

The Data Base .80 Subjects ........ . . . . . . . 80 Data Arrangement and Data Processing.81 Data Analysis ..... .

Reference Establishment. Reference Miscues .. Genre Influences ... .

Presentation of Findings .. .

.83

.86

.86 . .87

.89

5

CHAPTER 4. SIX YOUNG WRITERS' USE OF PRONOUNS

CHAPTER

The Writers and the Texts Frequency and Distribution of

Pronouns in the Texts Person and Number. Gender Case

Summary . . .

5. REFERENCE ESTABLISHMENT AND REFERENCE MISCUES.

CHAPTER

Proper Names. .. . Summary ....

Ambiguity. . . . .. .. No Explicit Antecedent Generalized Exophoric

Reference. Switches. Dialogue

6. GENRE INFLUENCES

CHAPTER

Letters . Reports . Telling About and Retelling Retell i ngs. . First Person Narratives

7. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

APPEND I X A

REFERENCES

Questions

.90

.91

.94

.96

.99 103 108

109

110 116 117 121

. 123 126 131

136 140 146 151 160

169

169

173

174

6

Table 1

Table 2

Table 3

Table 4

Table 5

Table 6

Table 7

Table 8

Table 9

Table 10

Table 11

Table 12

Table 13

Table 14

Table 15

LIST OF TABLES

Total Number of Texts by Year.

Text Types Across Students and Years.

Total Percentage of Pronouns Used Over Two Years

Third Person Pronoun Frequency

Distribution of Pronouns by Person

Distribution of Pronouns by Case

The Nominative Pronoun

The Objective Pronoun.

The Possessive Pronoun

Ambiguity Year 1

Ambiguitity Year 2

Amiguity Two Year Totals

Use of Dialogue Across Students and Years.

Types of Letters

Number and Length of Reports by Students Across Years.

Page

.90

.91

.93

.95

.96

101

103

105

106

118

119

119

133

136

142

7

Figure

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Relationship Between Textual and Situational Reference .•

Personal Reference ...

Demonstrative Reference.

Coding of Text .....

Co-reference in Anna's Report Jan. 12, Yearl. ...... .

Elaine Jan. 20, Year 2, Picture from "The Day the Sioux Came to Town.

Gordon Oct. 7, Year 2 ....... .

Page

43

44

45

80

.138

.142

.144

8

Abstract

Research into the comprehension of pronominal

anaphora in reading has lead to contradictory

conclusions about the role of pronouns in text and about

how and when they are processed by the reader. This

study investigated pronoun assignment from the point of

view of the writer. Pronouns and other referring

expressions were examined in the writing of six native

American (Tohono O'odom) children over two years while

in third and fourth grade.

The young writers appropriately used and

controlled the full range of pronouns in regard to

person, number, case and gender. In the two hundred ten

text analyzed, pronoun frequency was actually greater

than the pronoun frequency in professionally authored

text. This finding is attributed to an

overgeneralization of the language principle of economy

identified by Kenneth Goodman which states that pronouns

are used whenever possible except where ambiguity would

result. Unnecessary repetition of the noun phrase is,

thus, avoided. That the young writers conform to the

rule provides evidence that they understand and control

the pronoun system.

Reference establishment, reference miscues, and

genre influences were investigated in relation to

9

pronoun choice, strategies for choosing, and patterns of

ambiguity. Strategies for avoiding ambiguity included

the use of naming and length to disambiguate.

Reference ambiguities were rare and occurred

primarily in situations where the text merged with the

context as when the definite article or demonstrative is

used to point to something in the general context of the

writing situation such as a picture or reference

material. Although related indirectly to genre, the

specific conditions of the assignment were found to

affect the amount and kind of ambiguity most directly.

Developmental effects were examined in relation to sense

of a~dience.

Implications are that the direct teaching of

pronominal anaphora is not·only a necessary but may be

counterproductive because of the unnatural focus on

something that is already controlled. This study

confirms and supports the strength of a whole language

classroom where a writing process approach is used.

10

CHAPTER 1

REFERENT ASSIGNMENT FROM THE POINT OF VIEW OF THE WRITER

Child: Do you know the word "hippopotamus"?

Adult: Yes.

Child: Spell it.

Adult: H-I-P-P-O-P-O-T-A-M-U-S.

Child: Ha, Ha. No. I-T.

The success of this joke pointed out by Norman

and Rumelhart (1975) demonstrates how easily we, as

language users, assign reference. As users of language

we operate on the assumption that the people we

communicate with have enough shared information so as to

be able to assign referents to concepts we use in

speaking or writing.

The premise of this study is that the choice and

use of pronouns in children's writing demonstrates how

the young writer goes about coordinating cognitive and

linguistic information in order to express meaning

through the production of text.

Pronouns are small words that belong to the

complex system of reference in English. They also make

up a large percentage of the words in any given text

(about 10% of running words). That children learn to use

these referring expressions with very little difficulty

is a phenomenon worthy of further exploration.

11

Appropriate use and choice of pronouns is

governed by the amount and type of information the

speaker/writer believes the listener/reader has. In the

case of oral language, the context of the situation

often helps the listener to understand the speaker's

meaning through the use of gestures, intonation, and

facial expression. In the case of writing, the writer

must be able to adopt the viewpoint of the reader in

order to produce unambiguous instances of reference.

Theory ~nd research indicate that both reading

and writing are constructive processes (Goodman, 1984;

Page, 1974; Rosenblatt, 1987; Bartholmae and Petrosky,

1986; Newkirk, 1986; Shanklin, 1982). When a reader

encounters a pronoun, the referent for that pronoun can

only be assigned based on the meaning that is being

constructed. In this way, readers make inferences based

on the knowledge, experience, beliefs, and values they

bring with them to the reading situation. These

inferences, within the context of the reading situation,

are what the reader uses to construct meaning.

Just as readers must make inferences at every

referring expression in the published text to construct

their interpretations, writers must also be making

similar inferences as they generate texts which

represent their meanings through the process of writing.

12

This study examines how these inferences are made and

how they are constrained.

Statement of the Problem

How meaning is constructed in written language

needs to be examined carefully from the perspectives of

both readers and writers. The relationships among the

reader, the writer, and the text are multi-faceted and

dynamic. This study deals with these dynamic

relationships by exploring one aspect of the writing

process. The general research question this study

addresse~ is: How does the developing writer's use and

choice of pronouns contribute to a theory of how meaning

is constructed in written language? The theoretical

implications of this question are two-fold; (1) the

generation of text is the construction of meaning, and

(2) to be meaningful, texts must meet the criteria of

cohesion and coherence.

Reference is a necessary element in text

cohesion. Referring expressions are what carry the text

along and eliminate redundancy. Each time a writer uses

a linguistic device to point to information that i s

available elsewhere in the text or context, that writer

is demonstrating the ability to effectively and

efficiently use the language.

In using referring exp~essions the writer always

13

knows the identity of the referent. This is not always

the case with the reader. In the instance of pronouns,

for example, the reader must assign a referent to a

pronoun in order to make an interpretation of the text.

The writer must make a decision as to whether or not to

use a pronoun or a coreferential noun phrase at any

particular point in the text. By looking at how

developing writers make this choice to use a pronoun or

to repeat the noun phrase it may be possible to

understand some of the elements necessary for coherent

writing. This, then, can lead to knowledge of how to

help children become better writers.

Research has implied that as writers become more

aware of their audience, the choice of whether to use

the pronoun or to repeat the noun phrase is governed by

how the writer expects the reader to interpret the text

(Britton, Burgess, Martin, Mcleod, &.Rosen, 1975;

Moffett, 1968; Shaughnessy, 1977). Much of the research

in the area of referent assignment has focused on how

and when inferences are made by the reader. This study

looks at referent assignment from the point of view of

the writer.

Background of the Study

To understand the contribution this study makes

to the building of theory, it is necessary to understand

14

the history of how the particular focus of the study

evolved for the researcher. The research stems from the

theoretical position posited by Kenneth Goodman (1984)

that reading and writing are sociopsycholinguistic

processes whereby the reader and the writer are engaged

in transactions with text that are always embedded in a

situational context. The nature of these transactions is

that text is constructed by the writer or reader in an

ongoing evolvement based on the organizing structures

(schemata) in the reader's or writer's mind.

The graphic display that signals the reader and

that is produced by the writer is called the published

text by K. Goodman (1984). The transaction with the

graphic display by the reader results in the

construction of meaning by the reader or the reader's

text. The transaction of the writer's intent which

results in a graphic display through the construction of

meaning by the writer is the writer's text.

This transactional viewpoint (See Rosenblatt,

1981) has been supported by extensive research in

reading using miscue analysis (Goodman & Goodman, 1974;

Goodman & Goodman, 1978; Market & Goodman,). Miscue

analysis looks at the process of comprehending text

through the analysis of how the observed response of a

reader differs from the expected response. The

15

transactional viewpoint in writing has been elaborated

by Shanklin (1982).

Over the past fifteen years there has been much

interest in text analysis from varying perspectives. The

central issue for reading researchers has been that

comprehension could be better understood through the

analysis of text.

It is important to point out two strands that

historically have led to the importance of researching

theories of processing extended text. Three different

disciplines are involved to varying degrees;

linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. For a

long time linguists did not look at units of discourse

larger than the sentence. LingUistics has traditionally

been concerned with specific properties of language.

Theories of phonology, morphology, and syntax focused on

describing structural relationships. Psycho- and

sociolinguistics followed this same approach (Van Dijk,

1980). Language learning processes were examined first

with sounds, then words, syntactic structures, and then

word and sentence meanings. Cognitive scientists

interested in artificial intelligence at first were

concerned primarily with parsing and generating language

at the sentence level with computers.

Researchers in these fields began to see the

16

necessity for studying units of text larger than the

sentence. The representation of meaning in different

types of extended texts has been approached in different

ways by t~e different disciplines.

Because of this great thrust of research in the

analysis of extended text, Goodman realized that he had

a great deal of information that could contribute to

research on text analysis. The miscue data from the 1978

miscue study (The Reading of American Children Whose

language is a Stable Rural Dialect of English or a

language Other than English) provided the necessary

information to look at text from the point of view of

the reader. Here were real readers reading real texts.

It made sense that the types. of miscues these readers

made could shed light on how text is constructed. What

resulted was a new look at the data and a research

project that looked at text structures as they relate to

patterns of miscues. It was at this point that I became

involved in a reanalysis of the original miscue data.

Each miscue was assigned a quality rating score. In

looking at the quality and quantity of the miscues of

eighty-eight readers at three different grade levels,

certain interesting patterns emerged which were all

reported in Analysis of Text Structures as They Relate

to Oral Reading Miscues (Goodman & Gespass, 1982). One

17

of these patterns was directly related to cohesion in

text, specifically reference. The miscues on pronouns

and determiners clearly merited more attention.

Much of the former reading research on pronouns

encountered in a review of the literature concluded that

pronoun structures for young readers were often

difficult to comprehend. Analysis of the miscue data did

not support these conclusions. In summary, the findings

from Goodman and Gespass (1983) were:

1. Many text pronouns show few or no miscues.

Others show identical substitutions by several subjects

indicating their shift to a different referent.

2. Pronouns are substituted for other text words

in rough proportion to their occurrence in the text. The

readers predict on the base' of their experience with the

text.

3. There is a strong tendency for substitutions

for pronouns to be other pronouns, generally from the

same grammatical case.

4. Non-pronoun substitutions fall into a very

small number of categories.

5. Determiners are frequently interchanged with

possessives indicating maintenance of cohesive

relationships while intensifying or weakening them.

6. Patterns of miscues ~nvolving conjunctions and

18

pronouns show the manipulations of the surface structure

of the reader's text by the reader using different

options from the author.

7. Shifts in person, gender, and number caused by

pronoun for pronoun miscues tend to be strongly related

to surrounding text.

8. When pronouns are omitted or inserted there is

usually no change in reference or cohesion that results.

9. Substitutions of nominative pronouns for

possessives usually come at the beginning of a clause

indicating the reader's tentative assignment of

syntactic patterns starting with subject pronouns.

10. Corrections of pronoun miscues conform to the

general finding of miscue analysis that corrections ~re

most likely when the text the reader is constructing

doesn't make sense (Goodman & Gespass, 1983, pp. 55-56).

It was concluded from the pronoun and determiner

miscues that readers act as if they know where referring

expressions will occur and know what their referents

will be as they encounter them. They do not seem to be

choosing from alternatives as they encounter each

referring expression. Because readers are seeking

meaning they are actively constructing· the text and the

assignment of referents is an integral part of the

creation of a meaningful text. Readers expect pronouns

19

to have referents. In looking at the miscues, it is

clear that pronouns and determiners in general are not

at all ambiguous to the reader. In fact, the presence of

these re~erring expressions faci'litates the making of

meaning because they signal the reader that the

information has already been introduced (Hirst & Brill,

1980; Miller, Bartlett, & Hirst, 1982).

At the same time'this research was taking place,

I was also involved in a study conducted by Y. Goodman

(A Two Year Case Study Observing the Developing of Third

and Fourth Grade Native American Children's Writing

Processes, 1984). 'This study involved an in-depth

analysis of the writing of six Tohono O'odom (Papago

Indian) students over the course of two years. The data

base consists of 215 pieces of writing done by the six

subjects plus a variety of teacher and student

interviews and observations of the classroom, the

setting, and the context in which the writing took

place. I was primarily involved in the syntactic

analysis of the written products the children produced.

In looking at the writing data, it became obvious

that there were certain patterns in the writer's choice

of pronouns that were similar to the miscues on the

pronouns which were explored in the reading study. All

of the writers were using many pronouns, all seemed to

20

be in control of the knowledge that the use of referring

expressions is necessary to the meaningful production of

text. The kinds of questions that arose were: How and

when does the writer decide to use a pronoun instead of

a noun? How does the writer decide how much shared

information the reader possesses? What pronouns are used

by the developing writers under different circumstances

and in varying contexts?

These are some of the questions that led to the

current study. Since the data base from the writing

project was available and large enough to begin to

explore the answers to these questions, it was chosen as

the base for the study.

The study of readers' responses to pronouns

demonstrated that all real texts must have referents and

that all readers, no matter how young or inexperienced,

must find ways of assigning referents in their reading.

Tasks which involve readers transacting with relatively

natural texts such as those in the miscue analysis study

provide rich examples to explore the study of readers'

responses to pronouns.

The data supplied by the writing project research

meet similar criteria:

1. The use of relatively unconstrained production

of text.

21

2. A large enough corpus to provide opportunities

for a wide range of pronouns to occur.

3. A relatively homogenous population in regard

to age, culture, and setting.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this study is to examine the use

and choice of pronouns in the writing of six Tohono

O'odom students over the course of two years (third and

fourth grades). The research question is: How do

developing writers, choose, control, and use pronouns in

varying contexts and under varying circumstances?

Specifically, this study answers the following

questions:

1. What is the nature and extent of pronouns used

in the children's writing?

2. How do the linguistic constraints of the text

affect the writer's choice and use of pronouns?

3. How does the general context of the writing

situation affect the writer's choice and use of

pronouns?

4. What strategies does the writer use to govern

the choice of pronouns?

5. What evidence is there of development in the

writers use of pronouns?

22

Objective of the Study

This study describes and analyzes the use of

pronouns as cohesive text elements in developing

writers. It examines how they use referring expressions

in their writing. It examines the choices writers must

make in producing coherent texts.

The study uses as primary data a corpus of 215

pieces of writing produced by the six Tohono O'odom

third and four grade children over the course of two

years. This particular data base was chosen because it

is large enough to contain the different structures of

pronouns and the data was collected in such a way as to

provide detailed observations of the context in·which

the writing took place. In addition, the pieces of

writing the children produced, although constrained by

the general "school" context, were not produced with the

intent of looking ~pecifically for pronouns. In other

words, the children's writing was done over a period of

time, in a variety of contexts, and for general school

purposes with no controls designed to produce or limit

pronoun use.

The study also explores the theoretical question

of how referents are assigned from the point of view of

the language producer. When the writer is able to step

outside and to become aware of how the reader is

23

constructing the text this provides important

information about how a string of language becomes a

text, how inferences are made, and how meaning is

constructed.

There is evidence (Bartlett and Scribner, 1981)

that ambiguities in young writers' referring expressions

occur primarily in complex contexts, situations where

the writer has to choose among a variety of linguistic

devices. By looking at the specific use of pronouns in

these young writers, explanatory systems can be built

which may be ~elpful in finding ways to analyze text and

answer questions about learning and teaching effective

writing.

This study examines the referential organization

of writers. It starts with writers of.a young age and

looks at the same six writers over a period of two

years. This perspective is unique in that it provides a

way to see exactly how context affects the writers'

choice of pronouns. Although many of the children's

pieces are on aSSigned topics, there is a great variety

of types of writing and many of the topics are generated -

by the children themselves. This provides a greater

range of response than the highly constrained response

of an experimental situation. If a writer chooses to

refer to old information in the text in different ways

24

depending on the writer's intent and the context of the

situation this should reveal insights into the way

coherence in writing develops and also how inferences

are made by both writers and readers.

~ignificance of the Study

Recent research has indicated that there is a

great need to study the relationship between reading and

writing (Atwell, 1980; Birnbaum, 1982; Harste and

Mikulecky, 1984; Newkirk, 1986; Peterson, 1986). For

many years reading researchers have been interested in

examining how and when readers assign the referent to a

pronoun because each such assignment requires an

inference on the part of the reader. The way these

inferences are made shows certain aspects of how a text

is comprehended.

Reference in Writing

In a similar way, it seems timely now to analyze

and describe the way the reference system operates ~n

writing. From the point of view of production we can see

how the writer demonstrates through linguistic and

cognitive means how inferences are made and how text is

constructed.

This study builds on and extends explanatory

systems that help to analyze text in such a way as to

25

provide a better understanding of how writing and

reading work and interact. It is hoped that this

information can help teachers establish programs for

more effective literacy learning. Improved understanding

of the elements that make a text coherent will be useful

to both researchers and practitioners.

Minority Students

That this study focuses on six individual

children over the course of two years is useful in

sorting out developmental issues of both cognitive and

linguistic natures.

That the children are Native Americans provides

an additional and important perspective often neglected

by research that tends to use subjects from the

mainstream North American population. Since schools have

been considered to be least effective for minority

groups, it is important to focus the attention of the

proposed kind of research on these groups.

Need for Theory

In order for educational research to make a

significant contribution to educational practice, it

must be based,on theory. This research stems from a

transactional sociopsycholinguistic theory of reading

(Goodman, 1984) which has at its "base the tenet that in

26

order to learn written language it must be kept whole,

meaningful, and functional.

27

CHAPTER 2

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

This chapter will present an overview of the

evolution of text linguistics and will specifically look

at pronouns as cohesive elements in the reference system

of English. This will be followed by reviews of

psychological, psycho1inguistic, and education studies

related to the comprehension of pronouns. Next will come

a review of r~search on the production of pronouns and

other referring expressions in oral language

development. Following thii will come more detailed

reviews and analyses of the small amount of available

research'on the construction, use, and choice of

pronouns and other referring expressions in written

language development and in the composing process.

The Evolution of Text Analysis and The Nature of TexV

The relationships between thought and language

have always been recognized as important and interesting

among scholars from a number of disciplines. For a long

time though, people put effort into trying to decide

whether thought determines language or language

1 Portions of this section are from the technical report of a research study, Goodman and Gespass, 1983,'Text Features as They Relate to Miscues. Pronouns

28

determines thought. The controversy over this question

is no longer prominent, but a question of continuing

importance is how thought is expressed through language.

Theoretici,ans and researchers are concerned with how

language is used to express meaning.

Theoretical linguistics, especially in the

United States, has been concerned in its current dyn~mic

epoch with the sentence as the unit of analysis. In

fact, 'a common definition of a language has been the set

of sentences which the grammar of the ,language would

generate (Chomsky, 1957). This preoccupation with the

sentence was productive because it led to a very

sophisticated understanding of sentence structure and

how sentences express meaning. Since grammar largely

functions within sentences, a very productive

generative-transformational grammar could be built with

the sentence as the unit of analysis.

The problem is that the sentence is too small a

unit to use in getting at the complex ways in which

language works in human communication, thought, and

learning. Discourse or text is much more than strings of

sentences.

The necessity of incorporating meaning and use

into a theory of language has led to the study of texts

that has been a multi-disciplinary effort which is in

29

itself, interesting and problematic.

Because of the simultaneous interest in the

development of theories of extended text in different

disciplines, each discipline has made use of its own

terminology. What has resulted is a wide variety of

terms used in psychology, linguistics, philosophy,

semiotics, education, literary criticism, and artificial

intelligence which are not necessarily used

consistently. Winograd (1977) makes this point by

listing some of the technical terms used in the

literature:

text, discourse, context, deixis, dialogue, emphasis, role, background, setting, topic, span, macro-structure, pragmatic context, illocutionary, staging, script, rheme, prosody, bridging, functional sentence perspective, given, template, schema, rhetoric, performative, text grammar, implicature, fun~tion, anaphora, entailment, mixed initiative, communicative dynamism, focus, contextualization, textual coherence, conversational postulate, participant orientation, theme, story grammar, presupposition, comment, context of situation, narrative, relevance, episode, frame, foreground, speech act, new, macro-rule, reference, contrast, system, pOint of view, authorized inference, prelocutionary, rhetorical proposition, speaker-hearer contract, demon, code-switching, sincerity condition, communicative competence, causal chain, information blocking (po 64).

30

Winograd (1977) goes on to explain that

researchers in the area of discourse analysis have

different tasks. Linguists are involved primarily with

data exploration, computer scientists with model

building, and psychologists with model verification.

There is necessarily a great deal of overlapping of

these tasks.

De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981) point out that

the study of texts is not new. The traditional fields of

rhetoric and stylistics are concerned with many of the

same questions that present text linguistics address.

The difference is that these disciplines were not before

thought of as part of "linguistics" because linguistics,

particularly in the United States, until recently had

been very preoccupied with the sentence as the largest

unit of language to be analyzed.

Dealing with longer units of language than the

sentence, makes it increasingly important to define what

a "text" is. The question becomes: "How do we know when

a text is a text?" The simplest answer is that a text is

some aggregate of language which holds together in some

way. The determination of what a text is is not a matter

of its length. Rather, a text must make some sense, for

the people involved, as a complete unit within the

context of the situation in which it occurs.

31

Halliday and Hasan (1976) say that a text "is a

unit of language in use" (p. 1).

A text, then can be thought of as the basic unit of meaning in language. It is to semantic structure what the sentence is to lexicogrammatical structure and the syllable is to phonological structure. It is a unit of situational semantic organization: a continuum of meaning-in-context, constructed around the semantic relation of cohesion (p. 25).

De Beaugrande and Dressler (1981, p. 3) define

text as a "communicativ~ occurrence which meets seven

standards of textuality." Their standards are:

1. cohesion (the obligatory grammatical

dependencies in the surface text that signal

meanings)

2. coherence (ways in which relations are linked

to concepts).

3. intentionality (the attitude of the text

producer).

4. acceptability (the attitude of the receiver

of the text).

5. informativity (the extent to which the

occurrences of the text are expected vs.

unexpected or known vs. unknown).

6. situationality (factors which make a text

relevant).

7. intertextuality (factors which make the

32

utilization of one text dependent upon

knowledge of one or more previously

encountered texts).

Brown and Yule (1983) use text as a term "to

refer to the verbal record of a communicative act" (p.

6). Martin (1978) says that text is formed when meanings

are exchanged.

Stenning (1978) is interested in how specific

features of language function which allow us to conjure

up a·context for information which is not linguistically

explicit. Before setting out some guidelines for

establishing a theory of text, he observes:

... not just any sequence of sentences will do as a text; there must be some continuity~ some thread that runs through the text, some development of properties, or relations must recur to at least some extent. When they are lacking from the face of the sentences that make u~ the t~xt, our effort after meaning will usually succeed in creating them (p. 162).

Stenning observes how easy it is for language ,

users to construct possible contexts for parts of text

they encounter for which they do not have knowledge of

the context. Much of the context they construct is built

from nonlinguistic information. For these reasons,

Stenning argues that it is not useful to approach a

theory of text in the same way as one might approach a

theory of syntax. Unlike the problem of syntax where one

33

can begin by identifying the series of words that make

up the well-formed sentence, "the problem of text cannot

be looked at by identifying characteristics of the

sequences of sentences that make well-formed texts for

the reason that once we build the context, the text is

always appropriate to that context" (p. 162). Stenning's

position is that we must approach the problem of text

from the point of view of "characterizing what we are

doing in our effort after meaning" (p. 163).

Cohesion

Texts must have structures within them that

relate the elements of the texts to each other and to

coherent meanings. Those features of the text that can

be identified as providing the semantic structure and

holding the text together and which can be categorized

across texts are the elements which make the text

cohesive.

Cohesion, then, is important as a vehicle for

the meaningful interpretation of a text. The nature of a

text is that propositions are linked in a meaningful way

and features that provide those linkings are the

cohesive elements~ Halliday and Hasan (1976) say that

cohesion is the system of language that is text forming:

It is the means whereby elements that are structurally unrelated to one another are linked together, through the

34

dependence of one on the other for its interpretation. The resources that make up the cohesive potential are part of the total meaning potential of the language, having a kind of catalytic function in the sense that, without cohesion, the remainder of the semantic system cannot be effectively activated at all (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, pp. 27-28).

This statement makes clear why the study of

cohesion is important to both the study of reading and

the study of writing. If reading is making sense of

print, that is constructing meaning, and writing is

constructing meaning through generation of text, then it

seems that the study of those structures in the text

which make the text cohesive and thus provide the vital

webbing of the semantic system are very important in

coming to understand both comprehension and composition.

Halliday and Hasan (1976), Gutwinski (1976), and

de Beaug~ande and Dressler (1981) have been concerned

with systematizing in a formal way the cohesive elements

that form text.

Because the work of Halliday and Hasan (1976)

has received widespread attention, and is most relevant

to the current study, it will be highlighted in the

following section.'

Halliday and Hasan argue that TEXTURE is what

distinguishes text from non-texts. Both cohesion and

register contribute to making TEXTURE. Register consists

35

of the context of situation; the social and

psychological environment of the discourse. Halliday

(1975) uses the terms FIELD, MOD'E, and TENOR to show the

aspects of settings and purpose, function and type of

interaction of the specific piece of language.

COHESION consists of the semantic relations that

exist within the text. Items in the text which are

cohesive have specific characteristics that bind them

together. Halliday and Hasan (1976) categorize these

different types of TIES which make up their system of

co~esion analysis: "Cohesion occurs where the

INTERPRETATION of some element in the discourse is

dependent on that of another: The one presupposes the

other, in the sense that it cannot be effectively

decoded except by· recourse to it." (p. 4).

Halliday and Hasan categorize four types of

cohesive relations. These are referen~es, substitution

and ellipsis, lexical cohesion, and conjunction.

Reference is the semantic relationship determined by the

necessity of interpreting one element in the text by

another element in the text. Substitution and ellipsis

are cohesive in that they supply new information through

the grammar. Lexical cohesion is established through the

vocabulary and has the aspects of reiteration

(repetition of a lexical item) and collocation

36

(occurrence of associated lexical items). Conjunction is

a somewhat different kind of cohesive relation

determined by the general kind of connection that

depends on meanings expressed by the sentences that are

connected.

Halliday and Hasan point out that the linguistic

analysis of text, and therefore their cohesion analysis,

deals with the published text which cannot by itself

explain a given reader's interpretation or evaluation of

a text. What it can do is explain the features of the

text and show the text information the reader is

transacti~g with.

The analysis of cohesion, together with other aspects of texture, will not in general add anything new to the interpretation of a text. What it will do ·i s to show why the text is interpreted in a certain way; including why it is ambiguous in the nature of conversational inferences, the meanings that the hearer gets out of the text without the speaker having apparently put them in--presuppositions from the culture, from the shared experiences of the participants, and from the situation and the surrounding text. It is the text-forming or 'textual' component of the semantic system that specifically p­rovides the linguistic means through which such presuppositions are made. Similarly the analysis of cohesion will not tell you that this is a good text or a bad text or an effective or ineffective one in the context. But it will tell you something of WHY YOU THINK it is a good text or a bad text, or whatever you think about it (p. 328).

37

De 8eaugrande (1980) presents cohesion as those

devices that contribute to processing efficiency. He

defines these as:

DEFINITENESS - the extent to which the expression in the text is assumed to be identifiable and recommendable--in opposition to being newly introduced.

CO-REFERENCE - the application of different surface expressions to the same entity in a textual world.

ANAPHORA - type of co-reference where a lexical expression is later followed by a pro-form in the surface text.

CATAPHORA - type of co-reference where a lexical expression is preceded by a preform in the surface text.

EXOPHORA - application of a pro-form to an entity not expressed in the text at all but identifiable in the situational context.

ELLIPSIS - the omission of surface expressions whose conceptual content is nonetheless carried forward and expanded or modified by means of noticeably incomplete expression.

JUNCTION - devices for connecting surface sequences together.

He summarizes:

These devi ces offer a' number of contributions to efficiency, (1) the compacting of surface expression; (2) the omission of surface elements; (3) the carrying forward of materials to be expanded, developed, modified, or repudiated; (4) the signaling of newness, uniqueness, or identity; and

(5) a workable balance between

38

repetition and variation in surface structures as required by the considerations of informativity (p. 134).

Coherence

As language users we are very adept at deciding

whether or not any particular text is coherent. We

expect text to be coherent and we do whatever is

necessary to provide a suitable context in order to

interpret the text in a meaningful way. Although we can

tell whether or not a text is coherent, it has been a

difficult problem for linguists and cognitive scientists

to formalize exactly what it is that makes a text

coherent.

Fries (1984) pOints out that in order to examine

the coherence of any particular text, it is necessary to

take into acco~nt both the causes of coherence which are

social and psychological and the language of the text

which contains specific features (e.g., cohesive

elements, and structure) which are indicative of

coherence.

This view is consistent with Halliday and H~san

(1976) and Halliday (1978), and emphasizes that language

is inherently social and that the cont~xt of situation

in which the language takes place is a necessary

component of coherent text. "A text is a passage of

39

discourse which is coherent in these two regards: it is

coherent with respect to the context of situation, and

therefore consistent in register; and it is coherent

with respect to itself and therefore cohesive" (Halliday

& Hasan, 1976, p. 23).

The concept of coherence is an important aspect

of the study of literacy. Both readers and writers

strive to construct texts that are coherent, that hang

together, that have unity. Teachers of reading and

writing need to understand where this coherence comes

from and how to facilitate control of it.

The cohesion analysis of Halliday and Hasan

(1976) has been used in a number of studies of reading

comprehension, some of which will be discussed later.

Tierney and Mos~nthal (1983) were interested to see to

what extent Halliday and Hasan's cohesion indicated

coherence. They found that cohesion analysis as they

used it was not a particularly useful indicator of

coherence.

Cohesion analysis was not, however, intended to

indicate coherence based on the quantity of cohesive

elements. Hasan (1984) elaborates this point by

explaining that the quality of cohesive ties in a

particular text is not by itself indicative of cohesion.

It is the cohesive harmony or how the cohesive ties form

40

chains that does indicate coherence. And it is the

interaction of the chains that makes a difference to the

unity of coherence of the text .

... it is neither the structure nor the context of anyone particular clause that gives it the status of cohesiveness; what matters is the same principle of similarity following which the paradigms of cohesive chains are created: This is why a clause by clause or a proposition by proposition analysis of a text will not reveal the nature of coherence in texts" (p. 219).

Phelps (1985) defines coherence as "the

experience of meaningfulness correlated with successful

integration during reading, which the reader projects

back into the text as a quality of wholeness in its

meanings" (p. 21). She goes on to say

Coherence belongs to both writer and reader as their joint 'product through complementary actions. It has its origin in the writer's intention as it has emerged through the course of a writing process and issued in a text; its realization in the reader's cognitive activity, both bound and free; its source and materials in the knowledge and feelings of both writer and reader, scientifically based, its instrument in the mediating symbol (p. 21).

Defining Reference

The question of what reference is has been and·

still is a major problem both of philosophy and

linguistics. It is far beyond the scope of this study to

attempt an extensive review of the literature on

41

reference. It is, however, important to touch on several

of the main issues which are relevant to the current

study.

Akmajian, Demers, and Harnish (1979) assert that

there are two major competing theories of reference.

These are 1) The description theory which says that a

particular expression refers to its referent because it

uniquely describes the referent, and 2) the historical

chain theory which says that a particular expression

refers to its referent because there is an historical

relation between the words of-the expression and some

initial naming of the object. Akmajian et al., argue

that the description theory works best for examples such

as "the first person to walk on the moon" (p. 247) which

refers uniquely to Neil Armstrong. The historical chain

theory works best for proper names and ·pronouns which

have no unique descriptions.

lyons (1977) gives an interesting account of

reference. He says that the term reference "has to do

with the relationship between an expression and what

that expression stands for on particular occasions of

its utterance" (p. 174}.

lyons points out that there are, in the grammar

of English, three kinds of singular definite referring

expressions. These are: 1) definite noun phrases, 2)

42

proper names, and 3) personal pronouns (p. 179). Lyons

explains that although these three kinds of referring

expressions are distinguished in the grammar, there are

borderline cases where one category has moved into

another. "Many place names and family names originated

as definite descriptions or titles; and proper names can

be regularly converted into descriptive lexemes and used

as such in referring or predictive expressions" (p.

179). Because there is this movement from one category

to another over time, Lyons says this suggests that the

function of the different kinds of referring expressions

is not always clear cut.

Lyons also believes that any function of the

definite article originated with its use as a deictic.

Karmiloff-Smith (1979) supports this view in tracing the

functions of determiners in young children's language.

In order to examine the use and choice of

referring expressions in children's writing, it is

necessary to explore the constraints of the linguistic

structure and to understand the function of the

referring expression for the language producer. It is

interesting to note that the miscue studies of pronouns

(Goodman & Gespass, 1983) and determiners (Goodman,

1983) offer evidence of how readers use both structure

and function in the construction of their own text which

43

is based on their transactions with the published text.

Examples of children substituting in their

reading, this for the or his for the or the for his

demonstrate the deictic use of the definite article and

the strengthening or weakening of the point of view

based on substitution of the possessive .pronoun for the

definite article or the' other way around.

Since the work of Halliday and Hasan (1976) and

Martin (1978) will be drawn upon in the proposed study

their use of reference as a cohesive relation in text

will be elaborated here. For Halliday and Hasan:

What characterizes this particular type of cohesion, that which we are calling REFERENCE, is the specific nature of the information that is signaled for retrieval. In the case of reference the information to be retrieved is the referential meaning, the identity of the particular thing or class of things that is being referred to; and the cohesion lies in the continuity of reference, whereby the same thing enters into the discourse a second time (p. 31).

Halliday and Hasan make a distinction between

situational reference (exophora) and textual reference

(endophora). Endophoric reference can be further divided

into anaphora (the form of presupposition that points

backward to the referent in preceding text) and

cataphora (the form of presupposition that points

forward to the referent in following text)., This

relationship can be seen in Figure 1.

44

I [sitll:ltion:ll] exophor:l

Reference: I

r

I [textual]

endophorn I ,

rto preceding text} :maphora

I . [to following text]

c:lt:lphor:l

Figure 1. Relationship Between Textual and Situational Reference. (Halliday and Hasan, 1976 p. 33)~

Martin (1978) adds that presupposed information

can be found not only in the context of situa~ions but

also in the context of culture. This kind of cultural

context is termed homophora. An example of homophora

would be to mention the president when no president has

.been previously introduced. In the context 'of this

country, ill president would Y'efer to the current

president of the United States. Halliday and Hasan

(1976) categorize reference into three types: Personal,

demonstrative, and comparative:

Personal reference is reference by means of function in the speech situation, through the category of PERSON.

Demonstrative reference is reference by means of location, on a scale of PROXIMITY.

Comparative reference is indirect reference by means of IDENTITY OR SIMILARITY (po 37).

45

Since the current study deals primarily with

personal reference and secondarily with demonstrative

reference, Figures 2 and 3 explicate the lexical items

and their places within the reference system of Halliday

and Hasan (1976).

Person:·

Semalltlc category

~ramlllatital fUI/clloll

, C/~~

spe:lkc:r (only) : Ilddressee(s); with/without

other persqn(s) , IpC:lkci: md other person(s)

, other person, male " other person, fcm:ale . ~ otliCr perspnsrobjccts , "objcct;'p:lSS:lge ortext . • generalized person

'- "~".... ',<': '"

Existential

He:ld

noun (pronoun)

I me

you we us he him she her they them it one

Possessive

Modifier

detenniner

mine my

yours your ours our his his hers her' theirs their [its] its

one's

For: c:ltcgo'ric::s ?£ ,gWIUlUrlC,:lI function and class. sec below.

Figure 2. Personal Reference (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, p. 38)

Se matitlc category

,Gralll ,mntlcal Juncllo"

ty: Proxlllll near far neutr at

Class

... . _ ... • 00

Selective Non-selective

Modifier/Head Adjunct Modifier

determiner adverb determiner

this these here [now] that those there then

the

Figure 3. Demonstrative Reference. (Halliday and Hasan, 1976, pg. 38)

46

Pronouns

. Grammatical rules do not relate pronouns to

their referents in any reliable sense nor is there any

simple rule for determining which, if any, noun phrases

in a text are co-referential. That would make it seem

that texts coul~ be made more comprehensible if they did

not contain pronouns at all.

There must be some reason why speakers and

writers use pronouns so profusely and pervasively. And

that reason must be more important than the apparent

loss of explicitness that results fr~m using pronouns.

There is, in language use, a kind of universal

rule of economy. Simply stated, the rule is that, in

connected discourse, once information or reference has

been established, that is given, it does not need to be

reiterated. This rule is much more broadly applied in

discourse than just pronoun use. Once an adjective is

used to describe a noun, THE RED CAR, for example,

further references to the noun do not usually include

the adjective unless it is necessary to differentiate

from some other car. There are other pro forms besides

pronouns. Auxiliaries, particularly DO, may replace

verbs in subsequent references.

HE LIKES TO GO FISHING? HE DOES IT ALL THE

TIME.

47

CAN YOU CLIMB THE LADDER? YES, I CAN

Prepositions may stand for adverbial phrases:

HE WALKED IN AND LOOKED AROUND.

There are many forms of elipsis that result from

this rule of economy. When asked a question the usual

form of response is to leave out of the statement all

explicit information form the question:

WHAT COLOR IS YOUR SHIRT? BLUE.

Another form of elipsis is deletion of the

subject in following clauses when it is the same as the

prior one:

HE WENT' UPSTAIRS AND WENT TO BED.

Thi~ kind of deletion creates a form of null

anaphora. The absence of the subject for the clause

makes it identical to the subject of the previous clause

since that's the only condition that permits its

deletion.

In oral language many things do not need to be

stated since the situational context makes them

explicit. Rather the language uses devices for

indicating referents. Terms like THIS and THAT are such

deictic, or pointing devices.

Hankamer and Sag (1976) see this rule of economy

as a process of avoiding redundancy through anaphor.

48

They express this in the terms of generative­

transformational linguistics:

Language provides us with two ways to avoid redundancy. Redundancy at the deep level can be eliminated by substituting a deep anaphor for the semantic unit that appears elsewhere in the discourse or in context; redundancy at the surface level can be eliminated by substituting a surface anaphor (generally null) for a surface segment that appears elsewhere in the linguistic structure (including wider discourse) p. 425).

The consequences of these conclusions, they

assert, are that linguistic competence cannot be

represented in a sentence-generating grammar and that

there must be a syntax of discourse. In order to

describe deep anaphora there must be some means of

accounting for the 'non-linguistic context as well as the

linguistic one. Hankamer and Sag (1976) conclude "The

only way, if we take the job seriously, is to assume a

representation of the discourse SITUATION which includes

not only the representation of the linguistic events,

but some STAGE DIRECTIONS as well" (p. 426).

Stenning (1978) has a related principle he calls

anaphoric conservatism. This principle states that old

elements in texts are not given new descriptions. The

principle, however, is not absolute. "Anaphoric

conservatism obviously can operate only to the extent of

the speaker's knowledge and does operate only to the

49

extent of his willi~gness to divulge information about

identities" (Stenning, 1978, p. 194).

Miller, Bartlett and Hirst (1982) also raise the

question of how authors prefer pronouns when noun

phrases could be repeated. They use Clark and Haviland's

integration model (1977) based on the "given-new

contract" to answer their question. They believe that

pronouns signal that the information is already given

(that is already known) and thus they facilitate

integration.

Pronouns exist in the language, then, as part of

a pervasive tendency to avoid redundancy and to say as

much as (but no more than) needs to be said. The system

works because listeners and readers are able, usually,

to make the inferences, assign appropriate references

and co-references where needed and build a meaningful

text within an appropriate context.

The fact that the system works and that it is so

pervasive demonstrates how little is explicit in

language and how much depends on inference.

From a linguistic pOint of view pronouns, at

least in English, perform grammatical functions and they

may be marked for person, number, and gender but they

are actually a part of the semantic system; they make up

a chain of relationship with the other parts of the

50

semantic system. The, specific reference of a particular

pronoun can only be determined from the total semantic­

pragmatic context. Halliday and Hasan (1976) argue that

it is purely incidental that a pronoun referent is

anaphoric (with a preceding referent) or cataphoric

(with a following referent). This is clearly different

from cohesive relations of substitution and elipsis

which are recoverable from the text. In the example

above we can reconstruct the full statement THE COLOR OF

MY SHIRT IS BLUE from the text by reversing the deletion

rules.

The relationship between syntax and semantics

needs to be addressed in understanding the role of

pronouns in a text and the readers' processing of them.

If we say that there is a meaning potential in language

which we ca~l the semantics of a language then that

meaning potential must be realized by the syntax or

lexicon of the language which Halliday calls the

lexicogrammar. Because pronouns convey semantic

relationships, in understanding reading comprehension it

is necessary to understand where readers must go to

realize the meaning being represented.

Pronoun reference is not the simple matter of

identification of an explicit noun (often proper noun)

antecedent that it is often considered. Stenning (1978)

51

has concluded that anaphors are indicators that point

linguistically to their referents much as a finger might

in an oral conversation:

Anaphors ... are viewed as demonstratives' that point to structures in the model that has been constructed and incorporate those structures into the interpretation of the statements the anaphors appear in. They may point to single elements of the domain identified by their antecedents; they may point to sets of such elements or to sets of groupings of those elements with other elements to which they have earlier been related; they may point to relations between groups of objects and incorporate the relation rather than the objects into the interpretation of their statement (anaphors of sense); or they may point to properties of objects and incorporate descriptions into their statements (where the antecedent is a tacit description or explicit predicate nominal)

When a phrase has an explicit linguistic antecedent, it will appear that the phrase, as an anaphor, is pointing to that antecedent and incorporating its linguistic structure into the anaphor's statement; yet for each such case, a counterpart is possible for which there is no explicit linguistic antecedent, and in these cases the phrase points to the relevant structure in the model rather than in some sentence. Since this is the case, we can always assume that even where there is an explicit linguistic antecedent, the phrase actually points to the structure in the model that that antecedent established rather than to the linguistic structure itself. By making this assumption we get a uniform account of the function of such phrases. It is in this sense that anaphors can be seen as repetitions of their antecedents (p. 196).

52

The Comprehension of Anaphoric Pronouns

The way pronouns affect reading comprehension

has been studied from several different perspectives.

Many of the.reading studies conclude that pronoun

structures do pose comprehension difficulties. Bormuth,

Carr, Maning and Pearson (1970) found that fourth

graders responses to anaphoric structures within 4 or 5

sentence paragraphs ranged from 65-78% correct. Based on

their taxonomy on anaphora, they conclude that direct

instruction. is necessary to enable students to

comprehend anaphoric structures.

Lesgold (1974) challenges these results arguing

that a hierarchy of syntactic skills cannot be useful

unless semantic factors and processing capacity are

taken into account. Lesgold (1974) partially replicated

the Bormuth et al (1970) by changing the questioning,

controlling for semantically plausible answers, and

using oral instead of written responses. On the

responses to personal pronouns the subjects were 91.7%

correct. He concludes that syntax and semantics must be

acknowledged in any investigation into the role of

pronouns in comprehension.

Richek (1976) designed a study to investigate

the comprehension of alternate anaphoric forms. She

concludes that the more explicit the form, the easier it

53

will be to comprehend; in other words repetition of the

noun phrase is easier to comprehend than use of the

pronoun. Her implications for instruction include

manipulation of reading material in order to match the

skills of the children.

Barnitz (1979) wanted to understand the effect

of development on the comprehension of pronoun

structures. In a controlled experiment he studied

second, fourth, and sixth graders responses to questions

about short paragraphs containing the pronoun i1 used

both anaphorically and cataphorically with varying

distances between the pronoun and its referent. He did

find that the older children comprehended the targeted

structures better than the younger children.

Chapman (1983) was also interested in the

effects of development on cohesive ties. Using cloze

passages with 8, 11, and 14 year olds he concludes that

" ... children's linguistic awareness of personal

coreference is still developing within the secondary

school" (Chapman, 1983, p. 67).

Kameenui and Carmine (1982) criticize many of

the above studies because of their use of short, highly

constrained texts. Their own study used 250 word

passages from both narrative and expository texts. They

wanted to see if pronoun structures replaced with noun

54

phrases would be easier to comprehend. They found no

significant differences in the narrative texts but they

did find that in the expository texts the replaced

structures were easier to comprehend. They suggest that,

in order to help fourth grade readers, pronoun

constructions be replaced in expository texts. They

conclude however:

These findings suggest that in ecologically valid materials, or at least narrative passages for which general comprehension is good, the presence of pronoun constructions may not have as significant an effect on general comprehension questions as could be inferred from research using contrived passages. (Kameenui and Carmine, 1982, p. 575).

These studies focus on the comprehension of

pronouns within the framework of implications for

curriculum and instruction. Other research is more

interested in how readers assign reference for pronouns.

Grober, Beardsley and Caramazza (1978) were interested

in determining what influences the assignment of

reference for pronouns. They found that causative verbs

influence referent assignment as well as semantic

content.

Frederiksen (1981) wanted "to identify text

characteristics that influence a reader's difficulty in

resolving problems of pronominal reference" (p. 4). He

looked at text features which included the number of

55

potential referents, the referent in subject position,

and ambiguous referent selection. In a carefully

controlled experiment, subjects read paragraphs from a

video display one sentence at a time. Since they decided

when they were ready for the next sentence, the

processing time could be measured. Fredericksen

concludes that greater processing time is needed when a

problem must be solved such as deciding which of two

potential referents is more likely. Frederiksen claims:

The results support a reinstatement theory in which a set of prior potential referents are reconsidered at the time the pronoun is encountered. Selection of a single "best" referent follows when intersententia1 semantic constraints will allow such a selection (Frederiksen, 1981, p. 53).

In contrast Hirst, Levine, and Henry (Miller,

Bartlett, and Hirst, 1982) believe that pronouns

actually signal readers that they know the referent

because that information has already been given. In this

way pronouns facilitate and initiate integration. With

an experiment similar to Frederiksen's, they conclude:

Pronouns unambiguously signal a listener or reader that the information contained in pronominalized clauses must be integrated with information introduced in the preceding text. Since repeated noun phrases do not share this property, text is easier to integrate when pronouns are used in preference to repeated noun phrases. (po 58)

56

In a psycholinguistic study, using natural

existing texts, Goodman and Gespass (1983) analyzed

pronou~ miscues. A full discussion of this research can

be found in Chapter 1 since it is the impetus for the

current study. Our results led us to conclude that

readers do not appear to be choosing from alternatives

when they encounter pronouns. Rather, in building

meaning they appear to know the referent for a pronoun

when they encounter it.

Using the same data base Pollock (1985) extends

and confirms these conclusions by looking specifically

at miscues as third person pronouns.

He found that "The frequency of pronoun miscues

reflected the frequency of particular pronouns in the

text, and this was taken to be an indication that the

objects were constructing a personal cognitively

interpreted version of the text" (Pollock, 1985, p.

143). He further concludes that this interpretation is

tentative and that readers will adapt and change their

interpretations when faced with disconfirming evidence

from subsequent texts.

In a third study using the same data base

Freeman (1986) analyzed five text features which are

used to assign pronoun reference. These are preceding

noun phrases, preceding pronouns, self reference in

57

dialogue, the dialogue carrier position, and paragraph

initial "I". He found readers make fewer miscues at

these places in the text than in other places in the

text. In addition Freeman found evidence of two reader

strategies; those of pronoun maintenance and topic

maintenance.

The three studies using miscue data (Goodman and

Gespass, 1983; Pollock, 1985, Freeman, 1986) suggest

that the direct teaching of pronoun/antecedent

relationships is unnecessary since readers seem to

control pronouns quite well. Baumann (1986) and Baumann

and Stevenson (1986) challenge these implications and

argue that the direct instruction of anaphoric

relatio~ships helps students comprehend anaphoric

structures in both short contrived texts and longer,

more ecologically valid texts.·

Gottsdanker-Willekens (1986) examines current

instructional practices in anaphoric structures. She

concludes that while many basal reader series contain

exercises that deal with pronoun/antecedent

relationships, there is little attention paid to this

skill in pre-service teacher education and in college

text books.

Barnitz (1986) in an extensive review of the

research on anaphora warns that "Pronouns are not

58

necessarily the villains of reading comprehension,

although experimental research may so imply" (Barnitz,

1986, p. 51). He continues:

Several factors interact in determining whether a reader will comprehend and recall a given anaphor. These include specific passage content; passage type (expository vs. narrative); specific language structures (such as verb structure, parallel function, and pronoun gender); and finally type, distance, direction and explicitness of reference. It is reasonable to conclude that processing difficulty or ease is a combination of all of these factors, not to mention other crucial reading characteristics like knowledge of passage content, memory development, inference ability, and linguistic development. (Barnitz, 1986, p. 52)

Pronoun Acquisition and Use in Oral Language Development

Gio (8 years old) tells the story of Niobe in the role of explainer: "Once upon a time there was a lady who had twelve boys and thirteen girls. and then a fairy a boy and a girl. And then Niobe wanted to have some more sons (than the fairy. Gio means by this that Niobe competed with the fairy, as was told in the text. But it wi 11 be seen how elliptical is his way of expressing it). Then she (who?) was angry. She (who?) turned into a rack and then his tears (whose?) made a stream which is still running today (Piaget, 1955, p. 116).

This famous example from Piaget (1955)

illustrates the extent to which pronouns pervade

children's narratives. Piaget asserts that although it

may seem as if Gio did not understand the story of Niobe

59

from the ambiguous use of pronouns in this explanation,

he did, in fact, understand it very well. Fro~ Gio's

perspective, he expects the listener to possess the same

information he has so in telling the story, he sees no

need to specify the referents in the language he uses.

Piaget uses these kinds of observations to

document his notion of egocentrism in children's

language. For Piaget, children cannot take the viewpoint

of another. They use language to accompany their own

individual activities. In this way, children's language

is not always comprehensible because they do not have an

audience in mind. Children may talk incessantly about

what they are doing but the purpose of the talk does not

take into account the perspective of the listener.

In contrast, Piaget asserts that adults' speech

is formed by social thinking in which speakers in

elaborating and c~nstructing what they.want to say, keep

in mind a particular audience.

The adult, even in his most personal and private occupation, even when he is engaged on an inquiry which is incomprehensible to his fellow-beings, thinks socially, has continually in his mind's eye his collaborators or opponents, actual or eventual, at any rate members of his own profession to whom sooner or later he will announce the result of his labors. This mental picture pursues him throughout his task. The task itself is henceforth socialized at almost every stage of its

60

development. Invention eludes this process, but the need for checking and demonstrating calls into being an inner speech addressed throughout to a hypothetical opponent, whom the imagination often pictures as one of flesh and blood. When,' therefore, the adult is brought face to face with his fellow~beings, what he announces to them is something already socially elaborated and therefore roughly adapted to his audience, i.e., it is comprehensible. Indeed, the further a man has advanced in his own line of thought, the better able he is to see things from the point of view of others and to make himself understood by them (Piaget, 1955, p. 59).

Maratsos (1973, 1976, 1979) has studied the

development of pronouns and determiners in young

children. He points out that these inconspicuous terms

which adults have an implicit knowledge of actually

present children with an extremely complex problem which

children seem to learn in spite of its complexity. He

warns that both empirical and theoretical knowledge is

not very advanced in this area.

Karmiloff-Smith (1979) is interested in

understanding how language fits into the study of

cognitive development. Starting from a Piagetian

framework, she argues that the study of child language

development must be approached from a functional point

of view as opposed to a structural point of view. Her

thesis is that "language development involves passing

gradually frQm a series of juxtaposed unifunctional

61

markers and processing procedures, to the

intralinguistic organization of plurifunctional systems

of options for modulating meaning" (p. 19). She chose

noun determiners as the basis of her studies for three

reasons: 1) they have a plurifunctional status in adult

language and at the same time are rarely emphasized; 2)

determiners appear early in the child's language; and 3)

determiners seem "to lie at the frontier between logic

and language, i.e., between non-linguistic cognition and

linguistic cognition" (p. 20).

In a number of carefully designed experiments,

Karmiloff-Smith used 1012 protocols from French speaking

children ages 2.10 to 11.7 years old. She did both

production and comprehension experiments because she

believes strongly that psycholinguistic research must

examine fully both production and comprehension. Using

one and excluding the other would lead to narrow

interpretations. In addition, after eacn experiment, the

child was asked to discuss awareness of the implicit

rules that were used in the response. Karmiloff-Smith

calls this "epilinguistic" awareness as opposed to

metalinguistic awareness. Examples of this epilinguistic

data are the "child's awareness of the implicit

grammatical rules he is using such as gender concord,

use of one article in preference to the other, anaphoric

62

reference, etc." (p. 63).

Karmiloff-Smith concludes that children use the

definite and indefinite articles in much more than a

contrastive way. She also notes that the development of

the different functions of determiners cannot be

explained solely by the development of non-linguistic

cognition.

Several of her conclusions are worth noting:

1) Even very young children from their first use

of the two articles, do not substitute one for the

other. They clearly have distinct meanings for each. The

indefinite article is used for naming while the definite

article is used as a deictic to make obvious the

referent in the child's attention and this is often

accompanied by pointing.

2) The explanation that the egocentric nature of

young children does not allow them to take the point of

view of the listener, ts not consistent with her data.

In her experiments the children did try to add

information (often not successfully) to make their

referents clear to the listener. She sees this as not

that the child cannot take the listener's perspective

into account but rather as an intralinguistic problem

concerned with the actual functions of the determiners.

3) Children expect language to be non-redundant

63

"if the referent is clearly identifiable from the

extralinguistic context, the child seeks, for instance,

other functions for the determiners which accompany

nouns. Thus, descriptor functions are acquired earlier

than determiner functions" (p. 232).

4) Children's choice of one function of the

determiners over another is dependent on the pattern the

child sees as most consistent.

Seeking consistent patterns is indeed the most efficient heuristic for coping with any environment, be it physical, conceptual, perceptual, linguistic, or even emotional. It is suggested that the child is not explicitly testing several hypotheses for various different functions and choosing the best one amongst them, but rather that he is recognizing positive examples of the function presenting the most consistent pattern (e.g., the nominative function of the indefinite article) and then seeking to conserve that pattern (p. 237).

5) Overgeneralization is an important way for

children to gain linguistic control of their

environments. By imposing their own patterns, children

must come to terms with the counter examples and somehow

deal with them. This leads to the dynamic process of

searching for new patterns and exploring the options

available to them.

64

Studies of Reference in the Writing of Yoyng Children

Few studies have looked specifically at pronouns

and determiners in the writing of young children.

Bartlett and Scribner (1981) set out to look at

referential organization as an aspect of coherence in

the written narratives of 52 children in grades three

through six. They define referential organization as

" ... the construction of expressions in written texts

which guide the reader in relating new information to

old" (p. 153). They are interested in the cognitive and

linguistic constraints that are inherent in the

construction of reference. They make use of the

linguistic theory of Halliday and Hasan (1976). Their

analysis provides information about the referential

status of noun phrases (introductory phrases and phoric

phrases), the linguistic form of the noun phrases, and

the location of referents (preceding, following or in

the situational context, see Appendix A.

The children in the study were given a topic and

asked to write a story based on it. In their data of

1660 referring expressions, 68 or only 4% were judged to

be ambiguous or misleading. Of these they determined

that most of the ambiguities "occurred within a single

type of context, one in which the writer attempted to

make anaphoric reference to one of two same-sex, same-

65

age characters who were interacting in the narrative"

(p. 161). They term this a complex context and conclude

that when children did have difficulty with referencing,

it was not due to an inability to use linguistic devices

but rather to a momentary performance factor in this

particular kind of complex context. They indicate that

this finding suggests that the linguistic context is

directly related to the amount of difficulty these

writers have in using appropriate referring expressions.

In a two year study Miller, Bartlett and Hirst

(1982) develop a model of anaphora and delineate its

implications for a theory of writing development. The

stu d Y i s bas e d o.n fin din g s fro m res ear c h 0 nth e

comprehension of pronouns (Hirst, Levine & Henry, 1982;

Hirst & Brill, 1980), which conclude that pronouns are

used in writing as a signal to' integrate. information. In

other words, the pronoun tells the reader that there is

not new information given at that point. This conclusion

is noteworthy because it provides evidence that the

referent for an anaphor is decided during processing and

not after processing.

An extension of the work of Bartlett and

Scribner (1981), the Miller, Bartlett and Hirst (1982)

study consists of several controlled experiments

designed to understand how more and less skilled writers

66

choose referring expressions. The experiments were set

up so that the context of the writing could be

controlled. The hypothesis was that the more complex the

situation (i.e., having two or more same-sex, same-age

characters) the more difficult it would be for the

writers to produce appropriate referring expressions.

Children in this study were asked to write about what

was happening in the pictures of a seven panel cartoon

they were shown.

The results were that the below average writers

did construct more ambiguous referring expressions in

the difficult context condition.

The kinds of ambiguities produced showed that

while the above average writers produced equal amounts

of ambiguous nouns and pronouns in the two conditions,

the below-average writers produced primarily ambiguous

pronouns in the complex condition. They did not find,

however, that the below average writers were less

sensitive to changes in sentence topic (i.e., where

there is a shift in theme or where the subject of the

sentence is switched). They also indicate that the below

average writers were less likely to name characters and

less likely to produce alternate wordings (e.g., the

other boy; another one).

67

In order to account for possible constraints of

the experimental condition (the cartoon sequence) the

children were also asked to produce stories about what

happened in response to a story starter in the hope that

this would elicit more natural language. The results

again showed that below average writers produced more

ambiguity. There were, however, no differences in the

type of ambiguities produced by the more and less

proficient writers. Also different from the experimental

data was the result that there was no difference in the

amount of character naming in the two groups.

In addition to looking at the production of

referring expressions, Miller et al. were interested in

how children revise and evaluate referring expressions

in their own and other's texts.

Three separate experiments were designed by

Bartlett (1981, 1982) to examine the children's skills

at detecting and correcting ambiguities. In the first

experiment eight texts were created that included three

containing a single ambiguous pronoun, three containing

two ambiguous referring expressions (a noun and a

pronoun) and two containing a missing subject or

predicate.

The results indicated that in the condition of

missing subject or predicate, if children detected a

68

problem they were likely to correct it. This did not

happen with the pronoun and noun/pronoun conditions.

Children were able to detect both these kinds of

problems, but they were much more likely to correct the

cases of ambiguous pronoun than cases of pronoun/noun.

Bartlett concludes that correction of the pronoun was

more likely because it involved a substitution of a noun

from the text for a pronoun. Examples follow with

typical solutions from the children's responses:

Single pronoun text. One day he got into a police car and drove to the city to catch a robber. They had a big fight. He was killed.

Typical solution. They had a big fight. The robber was killed (p. 26).

The noun/pronoun texts were more difficult to

correct because new information had to be added or an

indefinite reference had to be maintained.

Noun/pronoun text. One day a man left his house. Another man was standing outside. The man took out a letter and gave it to him.

Possible solutions. One day a tall man .... The'tall man took out a letter .... or One day John left his house or One man took out a letter and gave it to the other .... (p. 27)

In the second experiment children were asked to

revise six texts. Three were the noun/pronoun texts from

69

the first experiment and three noun/pronoun texts that

named characters.

The results were that the noun/pronoun texts

with names were significantly easier for the children to

correct than the noun/pronoun text where they would have

to generate additional information.

The third experiment involved looking at the

children's ability to detect and correct referential

ambiguities and missing subjects and predicates in both

thei~ own writing and in the experimental texts. To

generate their own texts, children were asked to write a

story using a story starter. They were asked to edit

their work for publication one to two weeks later. One

week after that they were asked to edit the experimental

texts. The results indicated that (1) children were much

more willing to correct syntactic problems than

referential ambiguities in their own writing, (2) the

children found it easier to detect problems in the texts

of others than their own.

One methodological point that must be noted is

that the original intent of this research was to find

subjects who were above and below average in writing but

were average in reading. It was very difficult to meet

these conditions which, in itself, makes salient the

interesting relationship of reading and writing.

70

It is apparent from the results of these

experiments that writers do not detect ambiguous

referents in their own writing. In this way, then,

pronominal reference is not a problem for the writer in

terms of establishing appropriate referents. What can

become problematic is how the writer's choice of

pronouns influences the reader's perceptions of the

pronominal referents. Although the inference made by the

use of a pronoun is obvious to the language producer, it

is not necessarily obvious to the language receiver. In

oral language this problem is often irrelevant. The

context of the situation and the gestures and intonation

of the speaker serve to clarify any referent. In written

language, it is necessary to understand how writers come

to view their writing from the perspective of readers~

This concept, known as sense of audience, is

essential for effective writing. It is reasonable to

assume that most of the time what is written is written

to be read if not for a varied audience at least for the

writer himself.

Moffett (1968) and Shaughnessy (1977) suggest

that much of the reason students' writing is ineffective

is that they do not have a suitable awareness of their

audiences. Beginning writers tend to operate from the

point of view that certain background information the

71

writer has does not need to be elaborated for the

reader. Flower and Hayes (1980) report that "proficient"

writers are much more concerned with their audiences

than "naive" writers. The cognitive factors that make up

lack of audience awareness are not very well understood.

From a cognitive development stance, this discussion can

be traced back to the Piagetian concepts of egocentrism

and decentration discussed earlier.

Several studies have explored the notion of

cognitive egocentrism in writing. Kroll (1978) began

with the hypothesis that fourth grade students would be

able to communicate specific information more

effectively by speaking rather than by writing due to

his belief that writing is more cognitively demanding

than speaking.

The experiment involved teaching ,children a

board game which they then had to explain (either orally

or in writing) to someone who had never played. The

results of the study were that although the children did

communicate the directions for playing the game better

in speaking than in writing, they were not particularly

proficient at either. In the second session, whether

speaking or writing, the communication improved. Kroll

concludes that these results indicate that the concept

of egocentrism or the inability to take the other

72

person's perspective is not a sufficient explanation for

lack of audience awareness.

Collins and Williamson (198l) examine the

theoretical position that abbreviated meaning

(incomplete and inexplicit) in writing is evidence of

the weak writer's dependence on the semantics of spoken

language. This theoretical assumption is based on

Vygotsky's (1962) views of written language.

The study involved the analysis of explanatory

writing by students in grades four, eight, and twelve.

Analyses were based on Halliday and Hasan's (l976)

notion of exophoric reference and Ong's (l979) notion of

formulaic expressions. They found that weak writers use

significantly more exophoric references than strong

writers.

The results support Collins and Williamson's

(1981) assumption "that weak writers represent meaning

in writing inexplicitly and in a manner more appropriate

to spoken than to written language" (p. 33). The

implications of this study suggest that writing

instruction cannot be geared solely toward teaching

young writers audience awareness. The authors caution

that, in teaching writing, overemphasis on the needs of

the r.eader may underplay the needs of the writer.

73

If writers n~ed help in overcoming abbreviat~d meaning or if writers expect that their writing will adequately communicate meaning if meaning is only represented as fully in writing as in speaking, then that need or expectation may not be addressed directly when instruction concentrates on the informational needs and orthographic and syntactic expectations of readers. Such instruction runs another possible risk as well if writing is difficult for weak writers, and if the difficulties involved in writing contribute to abbreviated meaning, then it is possible that instruction which attempts to add concepts with specifics, coherence, voice and audience awareness to the writer's task will increase those difficulties {po 34}.

It is clear from the above studies that young

writers must define and adjust their means of

communication in order to interact with potential or

realized audiences. It is not clear how writers learn to

do this. Cohesion analysis is one way of looking at this

problem.

In an in-depth longitudinal study of how

children learn to write, King and Rentel {1981} have

data from thirty-six children over the course of their

first four years of school. They expected that the

analysis of cohesive ties in the children's writing

would be indicative of developmental differences in the

production of texts and they report that this

expectation was met.

74

In a further study from the same data base

Rentel and King (1983) examined coherence in the

children's written narratives. Coherence was determined

based on cohesive harmony (Halliday & Hasan, 1980;

Hasan, 1984) and cohesive density (Markels, 1982).

Cohesive harmony, since it taps the interaction between chains of cohesive ties and factors operating in sentences, reflects the degree of coordination between textual relations and sentence relations. Cohesive density simply reflects the degree of connectedness between components of a text (Rentel & King, 1983, p. 9).

In this study they looked at recurrence chains

and chain interactions to get cohesive harmony scores.

Their findings indicate that children very

quickly develop cohesive harmony in their writing. At

the beginning of second grade, their writing contained

a n a v era g e 0 f e 1 eve n c h.a ins. By the beg inn i n g 0 f f 0 u r t h

grade, twenty nine chains. Interesting about these

findings are that the measure of coh~sive harmony makes

it possible to specify the components of coherence.

Rentel and King emphatically state that the children do

not have a problem with coherence .

. Many of their expectations of what they would

find in the children's writing simply were not met. For

example, they expected reiteration to be a dominant

chain in early writing and to gradually decrease in

75

frequency. This did not happen. Reiteration continued to

be an important chain forming strategy.

Rentel and King conclude that much of the recent

focus on the problems of children's writing has to do

with erroneous adult expectations. They argue that

coherence is not a problem for children but rather for

teachers. " ... these children appear to possess the

underlying capabilities to write coherent stories

without benefit of direct instruction" (p. 31).

Their implications are: 1) children's skill in

one facet of writing development will not necessarily

imply the lack or possession of skill in other areas of

development, and 2) competence cannot be generalized

across modes or contents.

Along with confidence that ability to learn simply awaits contextually grounded opportunity, all who deal with childrens writing should reserve judgment about quality until sufficient evidence is available to comprehend the logic of ends pursued by children. The logic of language acquisition seems much more carefully prepared by nature and nurture than the logic of adult evaluation. (Rentel & King, 1983, p. 34).

Cox and Sulzby (1984) analyzed referential

cohesion in told, dictated and written stories of

children in grades Kindergarten through two. In this

study the children were asked to tell, dictate and write

a story about a wind-up toy race that they had just

76

participated in. In addition to the cohesive analysis of

reference items, Cox and Sulzby were interested in how

cohesiveness in these kinds of writing tasks correlated

with reading .ability.

They found that uses of exophoric reference were

considerable. They also report that the children who

used anaphoric reference most frequently also used it

least ambiguously. An unexpected finding they report is

that the'second graders continued to use more exophoric

than anaphoric reference.

Their findings indicate that the development of

anaphoric reference use is not linear because more

anaphoric reference was used in kindergarten than in

second grade. Cox and Sulzby caution that this may be

due to instructional effects such as the reduction of

pronominal reference in basal readers. In addition, the

findings of this study suggest that by second grade more

proficient readers begin to pay attention to differences

in the use of situational reference in oral and written

language contexts.

Villaume (1988) suggests that the different

results in the King and Rentel (1982) and Cox and Sulzby

(1984) studies can be explained by the fact that the

children were asked to do different tasks. While King

and Rentel analyzed children's original stories, Cox and

77

Sulzby gave children the task of retelling an event that

they had orchestrated.

Villaume (1988) examined what she terms

"felicitous or audience - accommodating character

introductions" (p. 161) in the original stories of

children over one and one half years from mid first

grade to the end of second grade. She wanted to describe

linguistically how the children introduced characters,

to examine when character introductions were

infelicitous and to see if there were developmental

differences. Her findings indicate that children do have

knowledge of various linguistic forms and use them in

their character introductions which are sometimes

ambiguous. She also finds that "the increase of

felicitous character introductions over time can best be

described as a growing ability to coordinate multiple

narrative functions within an introductory clause." (p.

161) She concludes that her findings "support the view

that literacy development cannot be analyzed as a

stepwise addition of skills but must be analyzed as a

process involving interactions between multiple social,

linguistic and cognitive dimensions" (Villaume, 1988, p.

182).

78

CHAPTER 3

DESIGN OF THE STUDY

This study describes and analyzes the use of

pronouns as cohesive elements in the writing of six

children over the course of two years. The study also

explores what governs the six writers' choice of

pronouns.

The data for the study consist of a set of real

texts composed by a group of children which were a

minimum of two T-units long. The texts were written for

a variety of purposes and, although they are constrained

in that they were assigned by the teacher with varying

degrees of specificity, they are not constrained i.n such

a way as to control for variables as in an experimental

research situation. In other words, the children were

not asked to write texts so that someone could study

their use of pronouns. These texts were produced in

typical classroom settings under typical conditions.

The goals of the study are:

(1) To describe the quantity and usage of

pronouns in the children's writing;

(2) To identify linguistic and cognitive factors

related to the children's choice of pronouns in their

writing;

79

(3) To identify strategies children use in

establishing reference and co-reference in their writing

and

(4) To determine the effects of development.

The Data Base

The data base (Y. Goodman, 1984) provides 215

written texts of six students over the course of two

years while they were in third and fourth grades. Of

these five were eliminated because they had no

intersententia1 cohreference and were less than three T­

units long. Researchers visited the classroom biweekly

and one-to-one observations of the writing in progress

were made. The researchers kept field notes which

included a detailed procedure for observing the

behaviors of the children as they wrote as well as

general observations of the classroom and the nature of

the writing assignment if one existed.

While the current research uses the data from

the Goodman study, a complete and independent analysis

has been conducted. This analysis examines specifically

and in depth the pronouns used by the students.

Subjects

The six subjects are of the Tohono O'odham

(Pagago) tribe of southwestern Arizona. The subjects

80

were selected by their third grade teacher (a volunteer

participant in the Goodman study) in conjunction with

the researchers after initial observation. The intent

was to select subjects with a wide range of writing

achievement, so of the six subjects, two are considered

low, two average, and two high achieving writers. The

subjects attend public school on the reservation and

were all in the same classroom in third grade. In fourth

grade, three were in one classroom and three in another.

All six.subjects are native speakers of English.

Data Arrangement and Data Processing

The data base for this research exists in a form

useful for computer processing of natural language.

Figure 4 is an example of how the texts are stored and

coded.

#-h- rutap2.al3 1136 1983 616 2147 RUTAP 2/A13 The///hdg///// Derest/Desert//////r/ Museum///////// When////t/adv/ap/// we//////np///a/lpp/n//lp/ went//////vp/// to//////pp/// the////////st/b.O/name/o/// Desert///////// Museum/////////r st/ we/////m/np//rv/a/lpp/n//ll/ walked//////vp//rv/ and////////i/ walkde/walked/////vp&/// for//////pp/// a///////// long/////////

81

0/.//////// *then/Then//T/t/m/oth//rv i rv#/ ,///////rv/ *We/we//w///np//rv/a/lpp/n//lp/ saw//////vp/// some//////npm//st/c.O/ind+n/o/// wolfs/wolves//////// .///////// *the/The//T/t/m/np///c/def+n/n//phrase/ wolfs/wolves//////rr/ were//////vp/// playing/II/IlIff around/II/IlIff ./////////

Figure 4. Coding of Text

The original data base has the first nine fields

coded. Of these nine fields, five are used in the

current study. These are: field one -- the observed

response; what the student actually wrote; field two

the expected response, what the student read back to the

researcher or may have been expected to write (when this

field is blank, it means that the expected response was

not different from·what the student wrote); field five -

- the beginning of a new T-unit (t); field six -- the

beginning of a new clause; and field seven -- specifies

noun phrase or verb phrase.

In addition, fields ten through fourteen have

been added and coded specifically for the current

research. As is obvious from the example, only pronouns

and other referring expressions have been coded in these

additional fields. Field ten specifies the identity

chain marked by a lower case letter (e.g., a.o =

82

introductory noun phrase with subsequent referrals to

that noun phrase marked by a). Field eleven marks the

pronoun by person and number. Field twelve marks the

pronoun by case. Field thirteen marks any ambiguous or

unexpected usage with an asterisk. And field fourteen

specifies if the pronoun refers to a linguistic unit in

the text and, where it is possible, what that unit is.

The data in this format is called the source and

is the basis for the quantitative analysis. Grammatical

decisions were based on Quirk and Greenbaum (1973).

Data Analysis

The analysis is delineated below in reference to

the research questions asked in Chapter 1.

Question One: What is the nature and extent of

pronouns used in the children's writing?

To answer this question, the source (the coded

texts) was used to produce a computer generated output

for each text; an example of which exists as Appendix A.

Pronouns and other referring expressions were

categorized using an analytic design based on

modifications of those of Bartlett and Scribner (1981),

Rochester and Martin (1977) and Halliday and Hasan

(1976).

This categorization served to make explicit

(where possible) the relationship of the pronoun to its

83

referent. From this categorization patterns of pronoun

use were identified. This question also required counts,

lists, tallies and combined percentages of the different

pronouns and their distribution and frequency throughout

and within the texts.

All pronouns were categorized by number

(singular or plural) person (first, second or third) and

case (nominative, objective or possessive).

The phoricity of the pronouns and other

referring expressions was identified as endophoric or

exophoric (within ~r outside the text) and further as

anaphoric (the referent precedes the pronoun) or

cataphoric (the referent follows the pronoun). The

coreferent type was identified as textual or not

textual, explicit or" implied, and further identified as

a word, a phrase, or an idea. The distance from pronoun

to referent was identified by establishi~g an address

(T-unit, clause, and word) for each introductory noun

phrase and each referring expression and marking the

distance from the first to the last use by T-unit and by

clause. All introductory noun phrases and referring

expressions were also given an identity and traced

throughout the text. Any unusual or ambiguous usage was

identified and marked. The findings related to this

question produced the quantitative analyses.

84

The following four research questions comprise

the qualitative analysis which is based on the results

of the first question.

Question Two: How do the linguistic constraints

of the text affect the writer's choice and use of

pronouns?

Question Three: How does the general context of

the situation affect the writer's choice and use of

pronouns?

Question Four: What strategies does the writer

use to govern the choice and use of pronouns?

Ques~ion Five: In what ways does the developing

writer gain control over the use of pronouns?

Based on the results of research question one,

it was determined that questions two through five should

be explored from three primary perspectives. These are;

1) the way reference is established; 2) ambiguous,

unusual or unexpected pronoun use and missing,

exophoric, or generalized antecedents (grouped together

and hereafter called reference miscues); and 3)

influences of genre on pronoun use. As the qualitative

analysis proceeded, these perspectives became

interrelated and connected. The three perspectives are

explained in the following section:

85

Reference Establishment

To address the issue of the establishment of

reference, coreference chains in the children's writing

were examined. This involved seeking out how noun

phrases and proper names were introduced and then

tracing where and when the noun phrase or proper name

was reintroduced in the text as opposed to when a

pronoun or other anaphor was used.

Reference Miscues

To address the issues of ambiguous pronouns and

exophoric antecedents, all instances of these reference

miscues were examined and classified. Although these

occur in less than two percent of the running words the

children produced, it is a valuable way to explore what

governs decisions about the choice of pronouns.

Miscue an~lysis in reading is a proven way to

explore the reading process (See Marek & Goodman 1985

for a bibliography of studies using miscu~ analysis.).

"When expected and observed responses match, we get

little insight into this process. When they do not match

and a miscue results, the researcher has a window on the

reading process" (Goodman & Goodman, 1977, p. 319).

Similarly,

... error in the writing process must be viewed within a larger perspective of experimentation and development. It

86

holds that writers can, do, and must write directly for meaning. If the primary focus in writing is on meaning, and if one considers limits to the brain's processing capacity at anyone time, then the total elimination of error at the "point of utterance" is an unrealistic goal ... Thus writers' errors should not be viewed as accidents. Instead, they reflect the nature of processing activity and for this reason are called missed transactions ... (Shanklin, 1982, p. 137)

Genre Influences

To address the issue of genre, each text was

identified by type based on the predominant person

evident in the genre (i.e., first person narratives,

third person narratives and letters (second person»2

The classification of genre type was further

refined by circumstances that affected the context of

the situation in which the "writing episode" occurred

(i.e., the assignment, socialization, use of reference

or resource materials, the teachers questions).

An unanticipated factor in the current study was

just how crucial the context of the situation was to the

use and control of pronouns in the children's writing.

It was expected that genre would influence the

2 The Y. Goodman (1984) study from which the data for the current research comes, also identified the texts by genre type but the classification here results from an independent analysis conducted by the researcher and based predominantly on the stance implied by the use of personal pronouns.

87

developing writers' pronoun use. As it turns out, it was

not simply genre but also the nature of the assignment

and often even the wording of the assignment that

influenced pronoun choice and use.

In retrospect, this is not surprising. If

writing is the construction of meaning,then, the

process by which meaning is built has to involve the

entire frame of reference of the writer.

Writing, we know, is always an event in time, occurring at a particular moment in the writer's biography, in particular circumstances, under particular pressures, external as well as internal. In short, the writer is always transacting with a personal, social, and cultural environment ... Thus the writing process must be seen as always embodying both personal and social, or individual and envi·ronmental factors. (Rosenblatt, 1988, p. 7)

It follows then, that for the beginning writer,

especially, making reference to the entire context of

the situation within the evolving text itself is

integral to the writing process. In other words, the

context merges with the text. Thus, the examination of

pronoun use and choice in the children's writing cannot

ignore the social and pragmatic contexts of the writing

situation.

For the current research, these factors were

taken into account in the descriptive analysis of

pronouns in the children's writing in general and in the

88

influences of genre on pronoun choice in particular.

But, since the researcher did not have first hand

knowledge of the entire writing contexts in which the

texts were produced, it was not always possible to

reconstruct the contexts.

Presentation of Findings

The research results will be presented in an

organizational scheme that highlights the general

findings. Chapter 4 will include the results and

discussion of the quantitative analysis. Chapter 5 will

discuss the findings related to reference establishment

and reference miscues. Chapter 6 will discuss genre

influences and include a chronoloqical in-depth

examination of each of th~ six children's third person

narratives. Chapter 7 will present the conclusions in

the framework of the original research questions.

Chapter 7 will also discuss the relationship of the

current research of children's use of pronouns in

writing to that of children's comprehension of pronouns

in reading as well as implications and recommendations

for further research.

89

CHAPTER 4

SIX YOUNG WRITERS' USE OF PRONOUNS

My interest in pronouns in children's writing grew

out of concern for the conclusions of various reading

studies concerned with the comprehension of cohesive

relationships. Many of these studies which looked

specifically at the comprehension of pronouns used

experimental paradigms which by necessity had to control

for certain variables and therefore used synthetic

highly constrained texts designed exclusively for the

particular study. Although, within their limitations,

these studies may demonstrate how a specific linguistic

feature influences readers, many fail blatantly in their

pedagogical implications which state that children, in

order to comprehend pronouns, m~st have direct

instruction in identifying pronouns as cohesive ties in

texts.

These kinds of implications are at best misguided

in light of the naturalistic research studies which do

not manipulate language in order to control for

variables. The major finding of this study is that all

of the six young writers know how to use pronouns and

use them appropriately most of the time. When the

writers' pronoun use could be considered ambiguous or

inappropriate the cause is not inc~mplete knowledge of

90

pronoun usage, but rather, inexperience in writing in a

particular genre about a particular topic for a

particular audience. Insights gained from miscue

analysis research have shown that pronouns in and of

themselves are not a problem for readers - even very

beginning readers (Goodman and Gespass, 1983). What

makes texts more or less comprehensible has to do with

the syntactic and semantic complexity of the text in

conjunction with the individual reader's schema (which

reflects experience with particular types of material)

and purposes for reading.

Miscue analysis research had been able to provide

information about the reading process from two

perspectives -- how the reader influences the text and

how the text influences the reader (Goodman and

Gollasch, 1982). The premise of this study is that

writing miscues of a specific nature can provide us with

similar kinds of information with the focus on the

transactions of writers and the texts they produce.

The Writers and the Texts

The subjects for this study are pupils from the

Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation in southwestern

Arizona. The data generated from these subjects comes

from a study by Y. Goodman (1984) which examines the

development of their writing processes. The selection of

91

subjects and procedures for data collection are

discussed fully in chapter three.

For this study, 210 first draft texts produced by

the six children over the course of two years when they

were in third and fourth grades have been analyzed.

Table 1 shows the total number of texts for each subject

and for each year.

Name Anna Dana Elaine Gordon Rachel Vincent Total

Table 1 Total Number of Texts by Year

Year 1 22 17 19 16 18 16

108

Year 2 21 17 13 23 15 13

102

Total 43 34 32 39 33 29

210

In Year 1 of the study, when the subjects were in

third grade, all six subjects were in the same

classroom. In Year 2 of the study three were in one

classroom and three in another. All the texts were

produced as part of the regular curriculum. Most of the

writings were assigned, although some were totally

initiated by the students. The writings which were

assigned were structured to various degrees according to

the nature of the assignment and the genre type. Because

this study looks specifically at pronouns,

classification by genre type is revealing.

Table 2 displays the texts according to type. The

92

designated types are first person narrative (1st p.

nar.), third person narrative (3rd p. nar.), letter, and

other. As could be predicted (Bird, 1985) most of the

texts are first person narratives indicative of

children's need to self reflect and to tell the stories

of what is important in their lives. The third person

narratives include assignments which asked the children

to write about a picture or to retell the story of a

film they had seen. The letters include both self

initiated letters and assigned letters. Text types

categorized by "other" include several expository texts

in the form of reports and a few poems.

Name Anna

Tota 1 Dana

Total Elaine

Tota 1 Gordon

Tot a 1 Rachel

Total Vincent

Total Total Tota 1 Tota 1

Table 2 Text Typ~s Across Students and Years

Year 1 2 1-2 1 2 1-2 1 2 1-2 1 2 1-2 1 2 1-2 1 2 1-2 1 2 1-2

1st p.nar 5

13 18

3 7

10 11 11 22

5 10 15

8 5

13 7 9

16 39 55 94

3rd p.nar 12

6 18

9 5

14 8 2

10 8

12 20

5 6

11 6 1 7

48 32 80

letter 3 o 3 1 4 5

'0 o o 1 o 1 o 2 2 2 3 5 7 9

16

other 2 2 4 4 1 5 o o o 2 1 3 5 2 7 1 o 1

14 6

20

total 22 21 43 17 17 34 19 13 32 16 23 39 18 15 33 16 13 29

108 102 210

93

Frequency and Distribution of Pronouns in the Texts

It was expected that the young writers in this

study would adhere to the general language principle

(Goodman and Gespass, 1983) of using a pronoun in place

of a noun whenever possible. In order for the language

to function efficiently, one must be able to distinguish

introductory (new) information from repeated (given)

information. Pronouns enable us to do just that.

Table 3 shows the percent of pronouns used by

the subjects by year. Of 13,666 running words the

average pronoun use is 15.64%. The range of pronoun use

is from Gordon's low of 11.37% in year 2 to Vincent's

high of 18.49% in year 2. The pronoun frequency appears

to be somewhat higher for these students than for the

basal reader texts examined in the Goodman and Gespass

study. In that study the frequency of pronouns for three

narratives (a second grade third person narrative, a

fourth grade third person narrative and a sixth grade

first person narrative) averaged 10.1%.

Upon closer examination, it was apparent that

the pronoun variability was affected by inclusion of the

first person narrative. In the current study, nearly

half the texts produced by the subjects over the two

years were personal narratives which accounts in part

for the higher percentage of pronoun frequency.

94

Table 3 Total Percentage of Pronouns Used Over the Two Years

Name Year

Anna 1 2

Total 1-2 Dana 1

2 Total 1-2 Elaine 1

2 Total 1-2 Gordon 1

2 Total 1-2 Rachel 1

2 Total 1-2 Vincent 1

2 Total 1-2 Total 1 Total 2 Total 1-2

Percentage Pronouns

17.32 15.84 16.45 12.34 14.84 13.82 17.86 17.70 17.78 14.18 11. 38 12.31 15.01 16.74 15.93 17.26 18.49 17.95 15.72 15.59 15.64

Number of Pronouns

191 245 436 145 254 399 197 188 385

99 158 257 121 154 275 165 221 386 918

1220 2138

Number of Pronouns

1103 1547 2650 1175 1712 2887 1103 1062 2165

698 1389 2087 806 920

1726 956

1195 2151 5841 7825.

13666

Table 3 also shows the variability of pronoun

frequency for each subject over the two year period.

There is less variability for each subject over the two

years than there is acrtiss all the subjects. This

indicates that the variability of pronoun frequency is

not si~ply correlated with specific text types. For

example Vincent has the highest percentage of pronoun

use over the two years, 17.95% while Gordon has the

lowest, 12.31%. Gordon has only one less first person

narrative. than Vincent, 16 and 15 respectively.

The table also shows that patterns of pronoun

frequency established by the writers in the first year

95

did not change very much in the second year. Elaine's

pronoun frequency in year one was 17.86% and in year two

was 17.70%. Those writers who used more pronouns the

first year continued to use more pronouns the second

year.

Person and Number

Two studies that looked specifically at third

person pronouns confirm the variability of pronoun

frequency. Pollock (1985) using the same texts as the

Goodman and Gespass reading study, found the frequency

of third person pronouns to be 5.05% in the sixth grade

first person narrative, 6.46% in the second grade third

person narrative and 6.72% in the fourth grade third

person narrative. Kameenui and Carnine (1982) found that

for two narrative texts and two expository texts in

fourth grade textbooks the pronoun frequency ranged from

5.08% to 9.12%. Table 4 shows the frequency of third

person pronouns for all six subjects for each year. The

range is from 3.51% (Vincent, Year 2) to 10.15% (Anna,

Year 1). The average third person pronoun frequency is

6.98%.

96

Table 4 Third Person Pronoun Frequency

Name Year Total running Total 3rd person Relative words gronouns freguenq

Anna 1 1103 112 10.15% 2 1547 66 4.27%

Total 1-2 2650 178 6.72% Dana 1 1175 92 7.83%

2 1712 113 6.60% Total 1-2 2887 205 7 . } 0% Elaine 1 1103 86 7.80%

2 1062 63 5.93% Total 1-2 2165 149 6.88% Gordon 1 698 50 7.16%

2 1389 70 5.04% Total 1-2 2087 120 5.75% Rachel 1 806 67 8.31%

2 920 75 8.15% Total 1-2 1726 142 8.23% Vincent 1 956 86 9.00%

2 1195 42 3.51% Total 1-2 2151 128 5.95% Total 1 5841 493 8.44% Total 2 7825 429 5.48% Total 1-2 13666 922 6.75%

This amount of pronoun usage is very similar to that of

the professional writers of children's basal readers

that the two previously mentioned studies examined. It

can also be noted that the two subjects with the highest

percentage of third person pronouns in year one (Anna,

10.15% and Vincent 9.00%) also had the lowest percentage

of third person pronouns in year two (Vincent, 3.51% and

Anna, 4.27%). This difference can be attributed to the

pronounced increase in first person narratives by the

two subjects in the second year of the study.

Although there are individual differences in the

frequency of third person pronouns versus first person

97

pronouns depending on the text type, the average

frequency of first and third person usage over the two

years is very much the same. Table 5 displays the

breakdown of pronouns by person. The average relative

frequency for first person pronouns is 47.46% and for

third person pronouns it is 46.89%. Clearly, second

person pronouns are used least by all the subjects.

This, of course, is not surprising as second person

Table 5 Distribution of Prono.uns by Person

First person Second person Third person Name Year F RF(a) F RF(a) F R(a) Anna 1 54 29.35% 18 9.78% 112 60.87% Anna 2 155 68.58% 5 2.21% 66 29.20% Dana 1 42 29.79% 7 4.96% 92 65.25% Dana 2 115 47.92% 12 5.00% 113 47.08% Elaine 1 108 55.67% 0 0.00% 86 44.33% Elaine 2 114 61.62% 8 4.32% 63 34.05% Gordon 1 37 39.78% 6 6.45% 50 53.76% Gordon 2 78 50.32% 7 4.52% 70 45.16% Rachel 1 47 40.52% 2 1 .72% 67 57.76% Rachel 2 57 37.50% 20 13.16% 75 49.34% Vincent 1 55 36.18% 11 7.24% 86 56.58% Vincent 2 157 72.35% 18 8.29% 42 19.35%

F = Frequency RF = Relative frequency (a). Relative frequency (RF) expressed as a percentage

of total number of pronouns.

pronoun use in writing is limited to specific

circumstances. The six subjects used second person

pronouns primarily in letters and occasionally in

dialogue. In one first person narrative Vincent (Feb.

16, year 2) uses ~ as a generalized exophoric

98

referent. An excerpt from Vincent's piece illustrates

this use. " .. My mom says if I really wanted to be a

medicine man, I would have to go the graveyard and sleep

by a medicine man that was living many years ago. Or ~

are picked. I do not know how ~ are picked. Some

people know when they are picked." 3

Second person pronouns occur least frequently.

Only Elaine uses no second person pronouns at all in

Year 1. In year 2, only she and Anna use no second

person plural. This may be attributed directly to the

fact that neither wrote letters during those specific

time periods. As with person, the data show no strong

differences in number, neither among the subjects nor

across the years.

Gender

Anna, Elaine and Rachel, the girls in the study,

used more feminine pronouns than the boys. But the third

person masculine nominative had the highest proportion

of use by all of the children.

In English, her is used as both the possessive

determiner and the third person objective. The masculine

uses his as the possessive determiner and him as the

objective. The table shows that the masculine is used

3 Throughout the text, the feature I am discussing in the children's writing will be underlined.

99

more frequently as object or possessive than the

feminine.

The neuter ii is not discussed here because

of the many generalized uses of ii other than third

person neuter. The generalized and exophoric uses of ii

are discussed in Chapter 5.

There are only three texts that use ii to refer

to a thing intersententially across the entire text. Two

of them are Rachel's and one is Vincent's.

Rachel Jan. 19, Year 2

The Kite

Once upon a time 1 saw a kite. (1) 1 liked it because ii was my kite. (2) 1 fly iieveryday. (3) Sometimes I fly ii

. with my friends. (4)

Rachel Feb. 2, Year 2

Tumbleweed

Once there was a tumbleweed just sitting there. (1) The wi nd bl ew ii away, far away. (3) ii blew ii to a city (3) and the people were mean to ii. (4) ii was in December. (5) A woman picked i1 up and had ii for her tree. (6) but when January came the woman didn't want the tumbleweed. (7) She threw ii away. (8)

Vincent March 17, Year 1

One day Donald Duck was sweeping .the sidewalk. (1) He dropped a five dollar bill. (2) He did not see ii. (3) He

100

thought it was a green paper (4) so he just tossed it away. (5) The garbage truck came and picked up the trash. (6) He dumped i1 in the garbage truck. (7) it went to go dump it out at the dump. (8) Donald Duck reached into his pocket and found out that his five dollar bill was gone. (9)

Stories about animals, some of which could use

the neuter it to refer to the animal, seldom do. The

children tend to assign a sex almost immediately to any

animal that they write about. In almost all cases, the

animal is masculine. Examples follow:

Anna Jan. 12, Year 1

Feb. 9, Year 1

March 11, Year 1

Apri 1 29, Year 1

Gordon Nov. 24, Year 1

April 28, Year 2

... The cactus wren is the state bird of A r i Z 0 n a. H e i· s spotted .. -.-

One day a bear did not know if it was winter. So M kept saying, '"

One day there was ~ puppy who was playing at the park ... ~ puppy ran home because his master came home ...

... 1 met a mouse friend. ~ was very ni ce ...

One day a turkey got Ollt of his home.

One day a wolf was walking in the desert and M saw a snake.

101

Rachel Jan. 12, Year 1

Feb. 11, Year 1

•.. The State bird lives in a nest in a prickly cholla cactus and the State bird eats weed seeds. He is black ...

One day in winter there was a bear and the bear lived in a cave and his name was Circle and ~ was very nice.

Only one text uses it to refer to an animal

throughout. This occurs in Rachel's text.

Rachel Oct. 27, Year 2

The Wolf at Night

Th ere i s a w 01 fin a vi 11 age. it 1 00 k s like il was made. The people saw the wolf and it was night. The wolf was looking at the star.

Summary. The masculine pronouns were used more

frequently than the feminine pronouns by all of the

children except for Anna and Elaine who use more

nominative feminine pronouns in the second year of the

study. Animals that needed to be assigned a gender were

usually referred to with masculine pronouns. There were

very few instances of the neuter referring to a thing

used intersententially across a number of T-units.

102

Case

Table 6 shows the percentage of the total

pronouns by case each child used in both years of the

study. It also shows the combined percentages for each

child for both years plus the combined totals for all

the children for each year (Total 1 and Total 2) and for

both years (Total 1-2).

The table shows that all of the children used

nominative pronouns most often. This confirms the

expectation that writers will use pronouns as subjects

when a particular theme is carried across a portion of

Subject Anna

Total Dana

Total Elaine

Total Gordon

Total Rachel

Total Vincent

Total Total Tot a 1 Total

Table 6 Distribution of Pronouns by Case

Year Nominative Objective 1 69.02% 15.76 2 60.18% 7.96 1-2 64.15% 11.46 1 73.05% 17.73 2 64.58% 11. 25 1-2 67.72% 13.65 1 70.10% 7.73 2 70.81% 8.11 1-2 70.45% 7.92 1 64.52% 13.98 2 65.81% 16.77 1-2 65.32% 15.73 1 80.17% 11. 21 2 59.21% 9.21 1-2 68.28% 10.07 1 67.11% 16.45 2 65.90% 12.44 1-2 66.40% 14.09 1 70.57% 13.64 2 64.43% 10.81 1 - 2 67.06% 12.02

Possessive 15.22 31.86 24.39

9.22 24.17 18.64 22.16 21.08 21.64 21. 51 17.42 18.95 8.62

31. 58 21.64 16.45 21.66 19.51 15.80 24.77 20.92

the text. In the study that was impetus for the present

103

research Goodman and Gespass (1983) found that in three

basal reader stories nominative proonuns occurred three

times more often than objective pronouns. This is also

true of the children's writing.

In looking at the difference in percentages for

the two years of the study, the use of both the

nominative and objective pronouns decreased slightly

while the use of the possessive increased. This may be

attributed to a temporary intensification of the

determiner iunction as several of the children

strengthen co-referential relationships through the use

of the possessive. The individual differences in the

distribution of pronouns among case, show that the

largest variation from year to year is in the

possessive. For example, Rachel goes from 8.62%

possessive in Year 1 to 31.58% po~sessive in Year 2.

Tables 7, 8, and 9 show the percent of pronouns

used by case for each child over the two years of the

study and also the percent by person and the relative

percent by person of all pronouns (% all).

Table 7, the nominative pronoun, demonstrates

the variation of use between first person and third

person nominatives. This is again, of course, directly

attributable to the narrative stance of the text in

conjunction with the amount of dialogue used.

104

Table 7 The Nominative Pronoun

Name Year Ip % nom %aU 2p % nom % all 3p % nom % all

Anna 1 44 34.65 23.91 11 8.66 5.98 72 56.69 39.13 Anna 2 92 67.65 40.71 0 0.00 0.00 44 32.35 19.47 Anna 1-2 136 51.71 33.17 11 4.18 2.68 116 44.11 28.29 DllDa 1 37 35.92 26.24 5 4.85 3.55 - 61 59.22 43.26 DllDa 2 87 56.13 36.25 5 3.23 2.08 63 40.65 26.25 DllDa 1-2 124 48.06 32.55 10 3.88 2.62 124 48.06 32.55 Elaine 1 62 45.59 31.96 0 0.00 0.00 74 54.41 ' 38.14 ' Elaine 2 85 64.89 45.95 4 3.05 2.16 42 32.06 22.70 Elaine 1-2 147 55.06 38.79 4 1.50 1.06 116 43.45 30.61

Gordon 1 26 43.33 27.96 4 6.67 4.30 30 50.00 32.26 Gordon 2 53 51.96 34.19 2 1.96 1.29 47 46.08 30.32 Gordon 1-2 79 48.77 31.85 6 3.70 2.42 77 47.53 31.05 Rachel 1 40 43.01 34.48 1 1.08 0.86 52 55.91 44.83 Rachel 2 30 33.33 19.74 12 13.33 7.89 48 53.33 31.58 Rachel 1-2 70 38.25 26.12 13 7.10 4.85 100 54.64 37.31 Vincent 1 45 44.12 29.61 5 4.90 3.29 52 50.98 34.21 Vincent 2 109 7622 50.23 8 5.59 3.69 26 18.18 11.98 Vincent 1-2 154 62.86 41.73 13 5.31 3.52 78 31.84 21.14 Total 1 254 40.90 28.86 26 4.19 2.95 341 54.91 38.75 Total 2 456 60.24 38.81 31 4.10 2.64 270 35.67 22.98 Total 1-2 710 51.52 34.55 57 4.14 2.77 611 44.34 29.73

Table 8, the objective pronoun, shows that the

percentage of objective pronouns used in the third

person is considerably greater than those used in the

first person. Only Elaine (who uses so few objective

pronouns altogether) uses the same percentage in both

first and third persons for both years. In the second

105

tot% 69.02 60.18 64.15 73.05 64.58 67.72 70.10 70.81 70.45 64.52 65.81 65.32 80.17

59.21 68.28

67.11 65.90 66.40 70.57 64.43 67.06

year of the study Gordon uses more first person than

third person objective pronouns which again may be

attributable to the amount of dialogue Gordon uses. In

all of the texts for the two years combined, there were

only twelve uses of the second person objective pronoun.

Table 8 The Objective Pronoun

Nmne Year Ip %obj % all 2p %obj %nll 3p %obj % all tot%

Anna 1 4 13.79 2.17 3 10.34 1.63 22 75.86 11.96 ·15.76

Anna 2 7 38.89 3.10 0 0.00 0.00 11 61.11 4.87. ·7.96

Anna 1·2 11 23.40 2.68 3 6.38 0.73 33 70.21 8.05· 11.46 Dnna 1 3 12.00 2.13 1 4.00 0.71 21 84.00 14.89 17.73 Dana 2 2 7.41 0.83 1 3.70 0.42 24 88.89 10.00 11.25

Dnna 1·2 5 9.62 1.31 2 3.85 0.52 45 86.54 11.81 13.65 Elaine 1 8 53.33 . 4.12 0 0.00 0.00 7 46.67 3.61 7.73· Elaine 2 7 46.67 3.78 1 6.67 0.54 7 46.67 3.78 8.11 Elaine 1·2 IS 50.00 3.96 1 3.33 0.26 14 46.67 3.69 7.92 Gordon 1 5 38.46 5.38 1 7.69 1.08 7 53.85 7.53 13.98 Gordon 2 15 57.69 9.68 2 7.69 1.29 9 34.62 5.81 16.77 Gordon 1·2 20 51.28 8.06 3 7.69 1.21· 16 41.03 6.45 15.73 Rachel 1 3 23.08 2.59 0 0.00 0.00 10 76.92 8.62 11.21 Rachel 2 1 7.14 0.66 1 7.14 0.66 12 85.71 7.89 9~1 Rachel 1·2 4 14.81 1.49 1 3.70 0.37 22 81.48 8,21 1O.Q7 Vincent 1 4 16.00 2.63 1 4.00 . 0.66 20 80.00 13.16 16.45 Vincent 2 12 44.44 5.53 1 3.70 0.46 14 51.85 6.45 12.44 Vincent 1·2 16 30.77 4.34 2 3.85 0.54 34 65.38 9.21 14.09 Total 1 27 22.50 3.07 6 5.00 0.68 87 72.50 9.89 13.64 Total 2 44 34.65 3.74 6 4.72 0.51 77 60.63 6.55 10.81 Total 1·2 71 28.74 3.45 12 4.86 0.58 164 66.40 7.98' 12.02

106

107

Table 9 shows that the possessive pronouns were

used with the most variability across children and

across years. While second person use was still lowest,

only Elaine used no second person possessives in Year 1

of the study. In Year 1 approximately the same

percentage of first and third person possessives were

used (44.60% and 46.76% re~pectively) but in Year 2 the

first person possessive usage jumps to 60.48% and the

third person possessive usage drops to 28.18%. Again,

this is due to a combination of an incre~sed number of

first person narratives in the second year plus an

increase in the use of dialogue.

Table 9 The Possessive Pronoun

Name Year Ip %pos % all 2p %pos %a11 3p %pos . % all tot%

Anna 1. 6 21.43 3.26 4 14.29 '2.17 18 64.29 9.78 15.22

Anna 2 56 77.78 24.78 5 6.94 2.21 11 15.28 4.87 . 31.86 Anna 1-2 62 62.00 15.12 9 9.00 2.20 29 29.00 7.07 24.39 Dana 1 2 15.38 1.42 1 7.69 0.71 10 76.92 7.09 9.22 Dana 2 26 44.83 10.83 6 10.34 2.50 26 44.83 10.83 24.17 Dana 1-2 28 39.44 7.35 7 9.86 1.84 36 50.70 9.45 18.64 Elaine I, 38 88.37 19.59 0 0.00 0.00 5 11.63 2.58 22.16 Elaine 2 22 56.41 11.89 3 7.69 ·1.62 14 35.90 7.57 21.08 Elaine 1-2 60 73.17 15.83 3 3.66 0.79 19 23.17 5.01 21.64 Gordon 1 6 30.00 6.45 1 5.00 1.08 13 65.00 13.98 21.51 Gordon 2 10 37.04 6.45 3 11.11 1.94 14 51.85 9.03 17.42 Gordon 1-2 16 34.04 6.45 4 8.51 1.61 27 57.45 10.89 18.95 Rachel 1 4 40.00 3.45 1 10.00 0.86 5 50.00 4.31 8.62 Rachel 2 26 54.17 17.11 7 14.58 4.61 1"5 31.25 9.87 31.58 Rachel 1-2 30 51.72 11.19 8 13.79 2.99 20 34.48 7.46 21.64 Vincent 1 6 24.00 3.95 5 20.00 3.29 14 56.00 9.21 16.45 Vincent 2 36 76.60 16.59 9 19.15 4.15 2 4.26 0.92 21.66 Vincent 1-2 42 58.33 11.38 14 19.44 3.79 16 22.22 4.34 19.51 . Total 1 62 44.60 7.05 12 8.63 1.36 65 46.76 7.39 15.80 Total 2 176 60.48 14.98 33 11.34 2.81 82 28.18 6.98' 24.77 Total 1-2 238 55.35 11.58 45 10.47 2.19 147 34.19 7.15 20.92

Summary

The frequency and distribtuions of the different

pronouns in the children's writing confirms the

expectation that the full range of pronouns would be

used. In fact, the percentage of pronouns the children

used is slightly higher than the percentage of pronouns

used in published texts by adult writers in the Goodman

and Gespass (1983) study.

Pronoun use in the children's writing was

dependent on the genre type, the stance of the narrator

and the amount of dialogue used. Although these factors

contributed to the overall distribution of pronouns, the

amount of pronoun use did not significantly vary across

students or across years.

While this quantitative analysis demonstrates

that these young writers do use pronouns in all persons,

numbers, genders, and cases, their control of pronouns

is best examined by looking directly at the texts they

wrote. Hence, the results of the quantitative analysis

augment the qualitative analysis that follow and will be

discussed within the framework of the actual texts the

children produced.

108

CHAPTER 5

REFERENCE ESTABLISHMENT AND REFERENCE MISCUES

As I proceeded with the analysis, it became

apparent that in order to understand how the children

were using pronouns as co-referents, it might be

worthwhile to discover how they established reference in

the first place. In tracing the co-referents for

introductory noun phrases, I noticed that the children

were much more likely to use a proper name than to

differentiate noun phrases through various kinds of

modification. Once they had established the reference

with the insertion of the proper name, then they were

likely to use pronouns as co-referents.

The other striking observation I made during the

data analysis was my own changing perceptions of what

constituted reference ambiguity in the children's

writing. I also realized that there are varying degrees

and levels of ambiguity -- some ambiguities are

acceptable and don't intefere with making sense out of

the text, some ambiguities are less acceptable and

present the reader with alternative meanings, and some

ambiguities interfere greatly with the construction of

meaning. For these reasons, I have chosen to refer to

reference ambiguities in the text as reference miscues.

109

This chapter begins with a discussion of proper

names in the children's writing and their relationship

to pronouns. The chapter continues with the discussion

of reference miscues and should be viewed with the

understanding that ambiguity is a construct placed on

the texts by the reader, not the writer. The chapter

ends with a discussion of dialogue in the children's

writing which is relevant to both reference

establishment and reference miscues.

Proper Names

Proper names have very clear reference. It is

interesting to examine the relationship between proper

names and pronouns in the children's writing. The

proportion of proper nam~s used by the individual

subjects remains fairly consistent across the two years.

Gordon uses the most names (a total of I07) and Elaine

uses the least (a total of 28). Pronouns are used about

eight times more often than proper names.

There is a brief period in very early oral

language development when children who are learning to

talk use more names than pronouns. This is presumably

because the names of people stay the same whereas the

pronouns change depending on who is speaking and who is

being referred to.

110

The following examples from the childrens' texts

demonstrate individual differences in decisions to use

names or pronouns. In Year 1, Anna has a series of texts

where an introductory noun phrase is subsequently made

more explicit by a proper name.

Anna Feb. 4, Year 1

One day a girl was named Sally. She was a pretty girl. One day she was taking a nap. A mad pirate got ber. He went into the wolkd (non-word) and got Sally. She tihe (non-word) she was at home. But when she woke up she was scared. At home, the father tried to call for her. But they kill the queen.

Anna Feb. 9, Year 1

One day a bear did not know if it was winter so M kept saying "is it winter?". His name was Jo. He was gOing to sleep.

Anna Feb. 23, Year 1

One day there was a girl. Her name was Flower. She was ani ce girl. Her mother wasn't nice to her. One day they went to get syrup from the cactus. In the morning, they had syrup and bread. The End.

Anna Feb. 25, Year 1

One day there was a boy named Warrior. He liked to walk in the desert. One day M got a jumping sticker. A coyote helped him. He said, "Thank you.".

III

Anna March 2, Year 1

Once upon a time there was a girl. Her name was Elaine. She was a nice girl. She lived in a house in Kansas with her brother Micah. One day there was a terrible ...

Anna March 4, Year 1

One day there was a girl. Her name was Maxine. She was a nice girl. One day her mother said, "Go give your grandmother some food." She said, "OK." So she went on the way. On the way she met a wolf. The wolf said, "Hi."

The above examples are all part of an assigned

unit on fairy tales. They illustrate that Anna has

seized upon a comfortable pattern to begin her pieces.

She uses a conventional fairy tale beginning of the type

"One day" and then introduces a noun phrase followed by

a proper name. Most of the texts are about girls but she

also uses a boy (Warrior) and a bear (Jo). The first

example of this series (Feb. 4) is the only one where

Anna reintroduces the proper name (Sally). It is also

the most ambitious and the most ambiguous of the series.

The main character in the text is Sally

introduced in the first T-unit. Sally is the subject of

the second and third T-units and is referred to as

"she". In the fourth T-unit a new character is

introduced (a mad pirate). Sally becomes the object and

is referred to as "her". In the fifth T-unit, the pirate

112

is the subject as "he" and Sally is the object referred

to here by name. In the next two T-units, Sally remains

the subject and is referred to as "she". It is at this

point that the piece becomes ambiguous. A definite noun

phrase is used in the eighth T-unit without a previous

introduction (the father). The last T-unit contains two

exophoric references (they and the queen). It seems as

if Anna in this piece has to know to whom "the father"

and "they" and "the queen" refer but she does not choose

to include this information in the written text.

The remaining texts in this series follow much

the same pattern. There is an introduction of the main

character, the naming of the main character, th~

introduction of a second character and the beginning of

some event which mayor may not include dialogue. This

series of Anna's writings serve to illustrate an

important feature in the writing of all six subjects.

There is a proclivity for naming even when, given the

constraints of the specific texts, a proper name would

not be necessary. Even though it seems important for

these young writers to "name" they do not seem to

unnecessarily repeat the proper name. They use pronouns

very efficiently and in appropriate ways. There is an

additional point to be made about this series of Anna's

texts. Only one (Feb. 25, Year 1) has the construction

113

of an appellative appositive (One Day There Was A Boy

Named Warrior). In all the other texts, Anna uses two

separate sentences to accomplish the naming of the

character. The clause embedding appears to be more

sophisticated and may also explain why, as clause

embeddings become more prevalent in writing, the use of

certain pronouns is eliminated. This is another example,

from a slightly different perspective of how the

principle of economy is always functioning.

The following example from Dana illustrates how

naming works to clarify previous text which may be

considered ambiguous.

Dana Nov. 19, Year 1

Nov.1a, 1620 Micah Antone was very nice to his crew. ~ was their captain. He told them what to do. One day one of his men was going to die. The women got Bob; that was his name. They were taking care of Bob. Micah was there too with Bob.

In this example, Dana has a problem in the fifth

T-unit where he uses a definite noun phrase the women

that has not been previously introduced. He then uses a

proper name Bob but apparently recognizes immediately

that this reference must be clarified so he inserts a

little addendum that was his name. This appears to be a

device that Dana carries over from oral language. From

that point on Dana refers to both male characters by

114

their proper names. It is obvious that Dana knows how to

use pronouns but chooses not to in this circumstance. It

may be presumed that he knows something in his text

needs clarification and this is a deliberate strategy to

specify. The problem in reference lies neither with

Micah nor with Bob, but rather with the women which is

never clarified within this text.

Of the six subjects, four use this or a similar

strategy for supplying information by insertion when

they sense a referent may be ambiguous to readers of the

text.

Only one subject seems to repeat proper names

for reasons other than clarification or stylistic

emphasis. Gordon tends to use an increased proportion of

proper names when he is writing about historical or

legendary characters. He does this for Jesus (Oct. 26

.Year 2), Santa (Dec. 2 Year 2) and in the following

example:

Gordon Feb. 17, Year 2

One day when Paul Bunyan was gOing to play baseball, ~ forgot to comb his hair. Then Paul Bunyan went back and combed his hair. Then Paul Bunyan went back to play baseball. But when Paul Bunyan was walking to the baseball field, ~ saw a mouse and Paul Bunyan's hair flew up in the air. And Paul Bunyan ran home and ~ never combed his hair.

115

Summary

The relationship of proper names to pronouns in

the children's writing may be summarized by the

following points:

1. All of the subjects use pronouns to replace

proper names in subsequent text except where ambiguity

would result or where the proper name is repeated as a

stylistic variation or for emphasis.

2. The subjects have a proclivity for naming.

The insertion or addition of a proper name appears to be

a useful strategy for clarification when: a) a second or

third character is about to be introduced; b) a second

or third character has already been introduced and there

is a need to differentiate them; c) the writer senses

confusion due to a totally unrelated ambiguity; and d)

as a means for personalizing the narrative to engage the

intended audience.

3. There are no strong differences in the

proportionate use of names and pronouns among the six

subjects or across the two years. The one exception to

this generalization is Gordon who, when writing about

legendary characters, tends to repeat the proper name in

places where the pronoun would be sufficient.

116

Ambiguity

The analysis of reference ambiguities in the

subjects' texts yields the most useful information about

how pronoun choices are made by young writers. It seems

worthwhile to emphasize again an interesting observation

about the coding of ambiguity in the data. As the raw

data was entered into the computer I flagged anything

that I considered ambiguous. As I became more familiar

with the individual texts and writers, the inferences I

made about the writings led me to consider fewer items

ambiguous. This, of course, suggests the forcefulness

with which the reader acts to make sense of the text.

The selection of a referring expression by the writer

must, in.the same way, include effective inferences

guided by the meaning the writer intends.

Tables 10, 11, and 12 show reference ambiguities

for each year of the study and the totals for the two

years combined. The categories of ambiguity are pronoun

(PN), determiner (DET), and omission (OM). The first and

most important thing to note is that there are very few

reference ambiguities. As seen in Table 12, altogether

there are 263 reference ambiguities. With a total of

13,666 words, that means that less than 2% of all words

are reference ambiguities.

117

In looking at the specific ambiguity types over

the two years, the number of pronoun ambiguities barely

changes from the first to the second year. There were 88

pronoun ambiguities in Year 1 and 89 in Year 2.

Determiner ambiguities descreased in Year 2 (from 46

Year 1 to 33 in Year 2). Omissions stayed very much the

same (3 in Year 1 to 4 in Year 2). Overall ambiguities

decreased in Year 2 (from 137 in Year 1 to 126 in Year

2) •

Ambig

Name PN DET OM Anna 13 7 0 Dana 18 3 0 Elaine 19 23 1 Gordon 13 4 2

Rachel 12 3 0 Vincent 13 6 0 Totals 88 46 3

Table 10 Ambiguity Year 1

texts Ambig /text

Total TOlal Ambig. Total 20 22 10 .91 21 17 3 1.24 43 1'9 13 2.26 19 16 9 0.95 15 18 8 0.83

19 16 8 1.19 137 108 51 1.27

Ambig Ambig /funit /100

Ambig. Total Total 2.00 .13 1.81 7.00 .13 1.79 3.31 0.23 3.90 2.11 0.22 2.72 1.88 0.12 1.85

2.38 0.17 1.99 2.69 0.17 2.34

118

words

Pronoun

1.18 . 1.53

1.72 1.86 -1.48

1.36 1.51

Name PN Anna 33 Dana 17 Elaine 20 Gordon 2 Rachel 4

Vincent 13 Totals 89

Name Anna Dana Elaine Gordon Rachel Vincent Totals

Ambig

DET OM 8 3 9 0 4 0 8 1 4 0 0 0

33 4

Table 11 Ambiguity Year 2

texts Ambig /tJ:.Xt

Total Total Ambig. Total 44 21 13 2.10

26 17 6 1.53 24 13 8 1.85

11 23 5 0.48

8 15 5 .53 13 13 5 1.00

126 102 42 1.24

Table 12

Ambig.

3.38 4.33 3.00 2.20

1.60 2.60

3.00

Ambiguity T-unit Year Totals

Ambig tJ:.Xts Ambig' /text

119

Ambig Ambig /l'unit /100 words Total Total Pronoun

0.23 2.84 2.13 0.12 1.52 0.99

0.1~ 2.26 1.88 0.Q7 0.79 0.14

0.06 0.87 0.43

0.10 1.09 1.09 0.13 1.61 1.14

Ambig Ambig trunit /100 words

PN DET OM Total Total Ambig. Total Ambig. Total Total Pronoun 46 15 3 64 43 23 1.49 2.78 .18 2.42 1.74

35 12 0 47 34 9 1.38 5.22 .12 1.63 1.21

39 27 1 67 32 21 2.09 3.19 .20 3.09 1.80 15 12 3 30 39 14 0.77 2.14 0.12 1.44 0.72 16 7 0 23 33 13 0.70 1.77 0.09 1.33 0.93 26 6 0 32 29 13 1.10 2.46 0.13 1.49 1.21

177 79 7 263 210 93 1.25 2.83 0.14 1.92 1.30

From the perspective of the individual children,

Anna's pronoun ambiguities increased in the second year

(from 13 in Year 1 to 33 in Year 2). The other students

had little change from year ·to year. In the category of

determiner ambiguities, the most evident difference is

in Elain'e decrease in Year 2. She ahd 23 determiner

ambiguities in Year 1 and only 4 in Year 2.

The next main category in Tables 10, 11, 12,

that of Texts, shows the relationships between the total

number of texts each child produced and the number of

texts that contained any.ambiguity. Only 93 of the 210

texts contained any ambiguities at all. In terms of the

individual children, this relationship is very

revealing. Elaine, probabl~ the least proficient writer

(Y. Goodman, 1984) has the largest proportion of texts

that contain ambiguities. Out of the 32 texts she

produced, 21 contained some ambiguous reference. On the

other hand, Dana, the most proficient writer (Y.

Goodman, 1984) had the least number of texts that

contained ambiguities related to his total texts. Out of

35 texts Dana produced, only 9 contained any reference

ambiguities.

The next main heading, Ambig/Text, shows the

average number of ambiguities per text, both for the

total number of texts and the number of ambiguous texts.

120

Dana, for example, goes from an average of 1.34

ambiguities per text to an average of 5.22 ambiguities

per ambiguous text. This means that those texts that

contained any ambiguity were likely to contain a greater

concentration of ambiguities.

The next main heading displays the number of

ambiguities per T-unit and the final main heading shows

the number fo ambiguities per 100 words, first all

ambiguities (total) and then pronoun exclusively.

No Explicit Antecedent

One of the goals in the field of artificial

intelligence is to get people to interact with computers

using ordinary language. In a recent book on the subject

(Cullingford, 1986), there is a definition of the word

it as an example of how the computer can be programmed

to handle pronouns. The definition is quite lengthy and

requires many steps to obtain the referent for it. For

all its length, this definition does not include several

of the more common uses of it such as "It's snowi ng" or

"I went to the zoo today. 1J:.. was fun".

1J:.. is different from other pronouns because as

Halliday and Hasan (1976) explain, it has both the

properties of extended reference and text reference. The

word it does not have to have a recoverable antecedent

that is a specific item. The antecedent can be a whole

121

process, activity, or episode. Even though it remains an

extremely difficult problem to program a computer to

find the referent for this use of ii, the six subjects

in this study have no trouble at all. The following text

illustrates this point:

Dana March 11, Year 1

One day I went to the circus with Harrington. The circus was in Tucson. Ii was fun. The circus didn't show the trapeze act ...

In t his e x amp 1 e, ii ref e r.s tom 0 ret han the

circus; it is rather the whole activity of going to the

circus. There are numerous other examples of this use of

ii; Anna April 28, Year 2 "One. summer day our family

went to Rocky Poi nt. Ii took three hours ... ", El a i ne

Dec. 7, Year 2 " ... We watched.Charlie Brown. Ii was

fun."

The next example shows several interesting

aspects of the uses of ii. (In this text I have retained

the actual punctuation that was used by Gordon but I

have changed the spelling to conventional spelling.)

Gordon Year 1, April 13

One day Ii was easter and my mother and my aunties were hiding the eggs. after they hid the eggs they started to cook.

Ii took a long time to cook 11. Ii took

122

19 whole hours It was done. I was hungry. after we-ate we looked for the eggs. I found 11 eggs. the end

In this text it seems as if Gordon uses what he

may consider to be an obligatory "one day ... " to signal

the beginning of a story. The first it is used as

equivalent to Easter. The second it refers to the whole

process of cooking. The referent to the third it is

truly missing from the text (Ii took a long time to cook

it.). The fourth it refers again to the cooking process.

The fifth it is ambiguous because it could refer to the

third it which would be the object of the cooking or to

the cooking process itself.

Generalized Exophoric Reference

Halliday and Hasan (1976) say that the pronouns

~, we, ~, ~, and it all have a generalized

exophoric use. The subjects in this study do not use one

or ~ in this generalized sense, (One must listen; We do

not chew with our mouths open). There is only one

instance of ~ used in this way. There are, however,

many instances of both it and ~ used as generalized

exophoric reference.

The it that Halliday and Hasan term a "universal

meteorological operator" is very common in the subjects'

texts; Rachel, year 1,1-26; Ii snowed; year 2,3-9;

When it rains ... ; Elaine, year 1, 1-8 and 5-4, Ii was

123

cold. Although this use of i1 is exophoric because there

is no text referent, it is not ambiguous because the

structure of the language requires there to be a subject

to the clause.

On the other hand the generalized use of the

pronoun i.!lll, meaning "those in authority" is often

overgeneralized in the subjects' writing and is used to

function as it might in conversation. In a conversation

if one happens to look out the window and say, "They're

paving the road" the context of the situation easily

provides the referent for i.!lll. In written language,

this use of i.!lll is not exactly ambiguous but it may

behoove the writer to be more specific in some

circumstances. In the following first person .narrative

of Vincent's, i.!lll is not ambiguous:

Vincent Feb. 2, Year 2

One day I went to pick bahitac. We use cactus ribs but we have to use long cactus ribs. We sometimes make it into syrup or jam. I like to eat the syrup with tortillas. I have never tasted the jam but I know i.!lll make it out of bahitac ....

In the first text that Anna writes there are

several examples of i.!lll that are ambiguous.

124

Anna Oct. 20, Year 1

The Wolfman

A man was going home. A second man got him. The next morning they did not find him. The police said, "We can't. But we did not find him." Then a lady got killed. Then one night ~ found out that it was wolfman. They killed it.

It is not clear in this text if ~ refers

anaphorically to a man and a second man or

cataphorically to the police or exophorically to a

generalized ~.

In the next example, Anna's use of ~ is

ambiguous because it is confounded by the possible use

of the ordinary third person plural.

Anna, Dec. 8, Year 1

The elf was making a toy. Then he got hurt. ~ rushed him to the hospital. The next day Santa Claus and the other elf went to go see him. They said, "We do not know what is wrong with him." So the next morning ~ said he was dead.

Another type of non-explicit antecedent

involves the use of it in idioms.

Dana March 9, Year ~

Paddle to the Sea

Paddle to the sea is going down a steep snowy hill into a river to start his journey across the land. Paddle to the

125

Sea traveled for days and nights and for lots of miles. He traveled in rough waters. But Paddle to the Sea made his journey. But he made ii.

In this text, the last sentence is an emphatic

statement that highlights the achievement of Paddle to

the Sea. The ii in "he made ii, is part of the idiom but

also does refer to "his journey". Another example of

this use occurs in the following text of Elaine's.

Elaine Nov. 16, Year 2

One day I wanted to ride the round-up. I got scared. After I rode the round-up I was not scared anymore. I got the hang of ii. I kept riding ii ...

Here, the ii in the idiom "I got the hang of ii"

refers to the activity of riding the round-up while the

second it refers specifically to the round-up.

Switches

Switches in person are not infrequent in the

children's writing. The most frequent person switch is

from third person to first person. Quite often this is

due to an insertion of the "I" of the author into what

began as a third person narrative as in the following

examples:

126

Elaine Nov. 3, Year 1

The cowboy was at the rodeo. ~ went to go see the horses and ~ was riding the horses. So ~ went to the indians an9 there was an indian. And so he went to go see the rodeo and 1 was riding the horse ...

Gordon Oct. 12, Year I'

Michael was Superman on Halloween. ~ looked funny. He went trick or treating with his family. ~ got lots of candy. Then 1 went trick or treating by myself ...

Switches in person are sometimes assignment

related. This happens in two different ways. The first

is due to the kind of assignment that asked the students

to imagine they were in another pla~e (later referred to

as "Imagine I" assignments) as in the following example:

Anna March 30, Year 1

When 1 was in Switzerland ~ have a horn that blows the cows home ...

The second was when the author inserted the

first person into what was assigned as a report:

Rachel Jan. 14, Year 1

"The Saguaro Cactus" 1 know it grows 50 or 40 feet tall ....

Switches in number are the most common switch

identified in the children's writing. Part of the reason

for this has to do with the problem associated with who.

127

is included in ~ or ~ and how that is made clear in

the text. Examples of this are:

Dana Sept. 15, Year 2

The first thing 1 did was to get ready to move to Cowlic. After that I went back to sleep. Then we ate ... -

Anna April 7, Year 2

One day 1 went to the Arizona 83 Fair. We had to bring some gifts ...

Vincent Feb. 2, Year 2

One day 1 went to go pick bahitas. We use cactus ribs but we have to use lOng cactus ribs... --

These switches are from singular to plural. In

most cases who "is included "in ~ is clarified at some

point in the text. In Vincent's text above the

clarification does not come until ~he ninth T-unit but

at that point he does clarify "Most of the time it is

just me and my mother".

Switches in number can also be attributed to the

assignment in some cases. When the assignment is to tell

about something the class has done, the tendency is to

start out in the plural and at some point focus on the

individual experience and begin to use 1 instead of we,

as in the following example:

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Rachel Apri 1 13, Year 2

When we went to the Desert Museum ~ walke~and walked for a long time. Then we saw some wolfs •... What 1 liked best? 1 liked the cave.

But the same assignment also produces a switch

in the other direction, from singular to plural:

Dana Apri 1 13, Year 2

1 enjoyed the trip to the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum. When we got there ~ were separated in groups of numbers ...

One other type of switch in number occurs when

there has been an introduction of a noun phrase and the

choice of pronoun to refer to this noun phrase does not

agree in number. This happens very rarely. In fact, the

only two cases where it did occur serve as examples:

Gordon Nov. 3, Year 1

One morning a cowboy was looking for some cows and for some horses. But ~ didn't because ~ didn't wake up too early. And ~ only came back with five cows and five horses.

Anna Nov. 10, Year 1

Two boys lived with same his father. One day the rodeo came and his father was in it.

It is interesting to note that both of these

examples occur early in the first year of the study. In

bpth cases, it is not simply a matter of number

129

agreement between the noun phrase and the pronoun but

there are also other complexities and ambiguities

involved. In Gordon's text we can assume that there is

some missing information after the first clause of the

second T-unit. In Anna's text the noun phrase itself two

~ is unclear from the beginning.

It must be remembered that all of the texts are

first draft writings. Most likely, even the most

rudimentary editing would uncover these ambiguities. The

point to be emphasized here, however, is how rarely

these kinds of ambiguities did occur.

Switches in gender happen only when the neuter

is used to refer to an animal. As discussed earlier the

children tend to assign a sex to an animal almost

immediately. Anthropomorphic switches occur infrequently

in these situations. The following is an example:

Dana Oct. 27, year i

After a while the collie turned over the lamb. li had a big teeth mark on his body.

Summar~. Switches in person, number and gender

contain different kinds of reference ambiguities. In the

case of gender, switches are primarily anthropomorphic

when the reference is to animals previously referred to

in the neuter.

130

Switches in number are quite frequent and occur

on several levels. The most common type of number switch

is to narrow or widen the focus of reference by the use

of the singular or plural. Ambiguities that result from

switches in number are often dependent on the reader's

perception of whom is included in "we" or "they".

Switches in person are the most complex type of

switch because of the implicit or explicit stance of the

narrator and the relationship of the narrator to the

author. The insertion of "I" into what begins as a third

person narrative occurs under several circumstances: 1)

when the writer loses track of where the narrative is

going; and 2) when the assignment places an added

conceptual strain on the writer (e.g., inexperience with

with a particular genre; inauthentic constrained

conditions). The switch from the first person to the

third person occurs: 1) when the writer has time

constraints and inserts a generalized "they" in the

piece in order to end it; and 2) when the assignment is

highly constrained or inauthentic as in the "Imagine I"

assignments.

Dialogue

The use of dialogue in the children's writing is

quite fascinating from both the point of view of

reference establishment and the point of view of

131

reference miscues. Dialogue, in writing, is the

occurrence of direct speech within the text. Because of

the changing roles of the speakers, dialogue is a place

in written language where different and varying pronouns

are used. Specifically, dialogue provides the place

where many first and second person pronouns occur in

written narratives.

The insertion of direct speech in writing

requires that the author take on different perspectives

of the characters depending on which character is

speaking. Because of this constantly changing

perspective, it is easy to assume that dialogue must be

difficult to write and that because of the varied

pronoun use, a place where pronoun ambiguities might

cluster. In the analysis of the six writers in this

study, all of the children used dialogue, speaker roles

were not confused in the least, and there were virtually

no pronoun ambiguities within dialogue sequences.

The dialogue carrier in almost all cases

precedes the direct speech. One student, Rachel, in the

first use of dialogue in her writing places dialogue

carriers both before and after the direct speech as in

the following example: And the boy said, "Who are you

making the bow and arrow for?" said the boy.

132

Table 13 shows the number of texts that contain

dialogue for each of the students.

TABLE 13 Use of Dialogue Across Students and Years

Student Anna

Total Dana

Tota 1 Elaine

Total Gordon

Tota 1 Rachel

Total Vincent

Total Tota 1 Total Total

Year 1 2

1-2 1 2

1 - 2 1 2

1-2 1 2

1-2 1 2

1-2 1 2

1-2 1 2

1-2

Texts with Dialogue

10 6

16 3 2 5 1 4 5 4 8

12 o 2 2 4 3 7

22 25 47

Total Texts 22 21 43 17 17 34 19 13 32 16 23 39 18 15 33 16 13 29

108 102 210

About one quarter of the texts the children

produ~ed contained dialogue. Anna and Gordon used

dialogue in the greatest number of texts while Ruth used

it in only two texts. Alice, however, tends to use

dialogue briefly in quite a number of texts while Rachel

uses extensive dialogue but only in two texts.

133

Summary. All of the children use dialogue to

some extent. There are no pronoun ambiguities in

dialogue sequences except for several instances of

repetition of the dialogue carrier.

134

CHAPTER 6

GENRE INFLUENCES

The amount of genre related pronoun ambiguities

has less to do with different text types than with

specific assignments within a particular genre. The

expectation was that genre would influence the amount

and kind of pronoun ambiguity. More specifically, it was

expected that genres with which the writers were most

familiar and most experienced would yield fewer pronoun

ambiguities than those genres that were new to them.

The findings indicate that pronoun ~mbiguities

in the children's writing cannot be simply correlated

with genre type. Pronoun ambiguities tend to cluster in

the children's writing in the following circumstances.

1. When the writer is uncomfortable with a

particular assignment

2. When the writer is swept up in the momentum

of writing a particular piece

3. When the writer is trying to do something new

or more complex syntactically

4. Combin~tions of the above

So although the relative frequency of pronoun

ambiguity in the children's expositions is greater than

in that of their narratives, this cannot be solely

attributed to inexperience in expository writing.

135

The following sections will ex.mine different

genres and describe where and when the clustering of

pronoun ambiguity tends to ,occur.

Letters

The children ,in this study have no difficulty

with the use of the specific pronouns needed to write a

letter. They are familiar with the conventional form for

letter writing and use 1 and You appropriately in their

sender/receiver function.

Of the 210 texts examined, 16 are letters -

slightly less than eight percent. Table 14 shows the

letters categorized by type.

Table 14 Types of Letters

Self-initiated letters Pen Pal letters Thank you letters Imaginary letters

(assigned) (assigned) (assigned)

3 8 2 3

There are no reference ambiguities in the two

self initiated letters or in the letters to pen pals

which were assigned. In the first year of the study, two

children wrote thank you notes to a group of older

students who had performed for the class around

Halloween.

136

Anna Oct. 29, Year 1

Dear Ghouls, (1) I really like it (2)

Gur class was scared, real scared. (3) Ii (It's) good. (4) Ii was fun but when you came in, Ii really was scary (5) I think it was scary (6) I liked the program (7)

From, Anna (8)

Dana Oct. 29, Year 1

Dear Ghouls, (1) I liked your program very much and thank

you for coming to our school today (2) It was fund being scared by you. (3) Are you coming next year? (4) I hope you do (5)

Love, Dana (6)

Dana's letter is a straightforward thank you

note. In the second line he uses the possessive ~

which refers to Ghoul.s and actually intensifies the tie

because the possessive serves as a determiner for

program and as a coreferent to Ghouls in the heading of

the letter.

In contrast, Anna's letter begins with an

ambiguous use of it as the object in (2). In (4) ~

becomes the subject but the reference is still not

established. In (5) Ii (It was fun) may refer to the

program or it may refer to the general experience of

seeing the program which is more likely. This it is

maintained for the rest of the text until (7), the last

137

line of the piece. What is remarkable is that in the

final line Anna does make the reference explicit and

uses the noun phrase the program for which the preceding

its refer to cataphorically. As the text developed and

as meaning was built, this writer was ultimately able to

clarify any ambiguity that might have existed.

There is one more point that must be addressed

in this example. Even though Anna's use of it at the

beginning of the letter could be considered ambiguous,

it really isn't in the context of the communication

event. She is writing a letter to the Ghouls who would

know exactly what she meant.

There is another set of letters written by the

students that contain ambiguities of a different nature.

The ambiguities that arise in the following texts seem

to result from confusion about the specific assignment.

The students were asked to write a letter to Mr. and

Mrs. Turkey telling them that their son had been killed

for a Thanksgiving dinner. In these instances, the

students tend to view the assignment as integral to the

context and as a result, the texts standing alone appear

to have some ambiguities. The following are examples:

Anna Nov. 17, Year 1

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Turkey, (1) I am sorry that your son died in a dinner. (2) I feel sad for you. (3) I think the next

138

Thanksgiving you should hide (4) But on Thanksgiving I will not eat you because I think you are nice People. (5) I am sorry your son Bob died. (6)

Vincent Nov. 17, Year 1

Nov. 17, 1981 (1) I am sorry that your son can't go to the

dinner (2) I never thought that your son had to bet he turkey at the Thanksgiving dinner (3) I felt sorry that day (4)

In these instances, ambiguities result, not

because of inappropriate use of pronouns within the body

of the text, but because of the lack of a closing in

Anna's letter and both a heading and a closing in

Vincent's letter. Headings and closings constitute the

form of a letter and serve to establish the context from

which the sender and receiver operate. We know that

these students understand the conventional form for

writing letters because of previous letters they have

written. Because this particular assignment is so highly

contrived, it seems as if the students see no need to

make these texts cohesive in terms of designating sender

and/or receiver. There is no need because the receiver

isn't real. The only person who will read the letters is

the teacher and since she gave the assignment in the

first place, the students see no need to repeat

information that was already given in the wording of the

ass1gnment.

139

Summary. The students used pronouns

appropriately when they wrote letters. They had no

trouble controlling the I-sender You-receiver aspects of

letter writing when the letters were written to real

people, asking real questions, telling real information.

When the assignments asked the students to write letters

for which the sole receiver was the teacher, the

assignment often became embedded in the context of the

letter writing activity and pronoun references tended to

become exophoric.

In support of the theory on which this study is

based, tw~ language principles are evident from this

analysis of the children's letter writing:

1. The principle of "economy" - The children

choose to include in the written text no more than is

necessary. When information is available to all of the

parties in the communication event, there is no need to

repeat that information in the written text.

2. The principle "form follows function" - When

writing serves an authentic purpose, there is a

propensity for approximating or attaining conventional

forms.

Reports

Expositions, especially reports, were among the

least successful texts the children produced (Goodman,

140

1984). This finding is not unexpected as students in the

primary grades are less likely to be exposed to report

writing and less likely to produce it.

Writing a report requires obtaining information

from one or more resources, selecting what information

is to be reported, and then writing it from the writer's

own frame of reference. From the children's texts alone,

it is not always immediately evident which texts are

actual reports because the students have a tendency to

turn an assignment for a report into a first person

narrative. An example of this is Dana's piece when asked

to write a report on the state bird and state seal of

Arizona.

Dana Jan. 12, Year 1

We talked about the stats seal and state bird. We had to read the paper. Then we wrote a story until the bell rang. The state bird's name is the Cactus Wren. Yesterday we did the state flag with Miss . We had to find out what the yellow and red stripes mean. What the copper star stands for. Same with the state bird and seal. For the state bird we had to find out where it lives and what it eats and its name. Then the bell rang. We had to change. Tomorrow I have to finish the state seal bird and flag. Today I am supposed to finish the state flag. But I didn't have a chance.

So Dana's way of dealing with the assignment is

to tell about the assignment; not write the report.

Another way the students handle writing reports is to

141

interject self reference into the text regarding the

topic.

Rachel Jan. 14, Year 1

The Saguaro Cactus

I know it grows 50 or 40 feet tall. it will only grow in Mayor June.

There are fourteen texts that are reports. Table

12 shows the breakdown of reports written by the

students over the two years, and the average length.

Anna Dana Elaine Gordon Rachel Vincent

Table 15 Number and Length of Reports

By Students Across Years

Average Num. of

Year 1

Average Num. of

T-Units Year 2 T-Units 2 3 o 1 4 o

4 2.7

4, 3.5

2 7.5 o o 1 2 o o

That there are more reports in Year 1 of the

study is directly related to what assignments were

given.

The table also shows that these reports are

extremely short texts. Except for Anna in Year 2, the

remaining reports are between two and four T-units long.

Of the thirteen r-eports, eight have no pronouns. These

reports point to the assignment 'itself as the referent

142

for anaphors used within the text. Thus, the pattern

becomes:

Anna 1 Jan. 14 Behind the seal is ... Gordon 1 Jan. 26 The green field stands for ... Rachel 1 Jan. 14 The blue shows ...

The definite article is an exophoric reference

to something in the context of the situation -- in these

cases the object of the assignment itself; the state

flag or state seal which is a photograph in the

reference material.

Pronoun use in three of the remaining five

reports follow similar patterns. An example of which is

shown in Figure 5.

Item T-Unit The state bird 1 The cactus wren 2 The state bird 2 He 3 He 4 He 5

Figure 5. Co-reference in Anna's Report Jan. 12,Year 1 Here there is a noun phrase introduced with the

definite article in T-unit (1) followed by an identity

statement in (2); (The cactus wren is the state bird),

followed by one or more anaphoric pronouns in the

subsequent T-units.

These reports can be classified as simple in

that only one noun phrase is introduced and any

subsequent pronoun refers only to the established

antecedent. There is also no change of theme in these

143

reports and the pronouns are always used in the subject

position.

Two interesting reports are written by the same

student, Anna, in the second year of the study. They

reveal a strategy of listing as a way of writing a

report.

Anna Oct. 12, Year 2

Hawaii

How many islands are there? Oahu, The Aloha island. Hawaii. the Big island. Maui, the Valley island. Kauai, the Garden island. ~ have a mountain that's called Diamond Head. On the mountain there is a national guard.

In this text, the Hawaiian islands are listed

followed by a description. They is used as a generalized

exophoric referent for the Hawaiian people.

The next text uses the listing strategy again.

It's possible that the assignment may have been

influential in the numbering of the statements because

the teacher had actually asked for three facts from

three different sources about a planet.

Anna Feb. 17, Year 2

1. Saturn is the second largest planet 2. Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun 3. Saturn is almost bigger than Jupiter 4. Saturn has nine moons

144

5. its not a heavy planet 6. it has at least 10 moons 7. the rings make Saturn look very beautiful 8. the rings are made of icy pieces of rock 9. it also has 15 moons

The first four T~units have Saturn as their

subject. The fifth and sixth T-units use the third

person pronoun i1 to refer anaphorically to Saturn. T­

unit seven has a change of subject to the rings. The

rings is maintained as the subject in T-unit eight. The

it in the ninth T-unit is ambiguous. We are not sure if

it refe~s back to Saturn or to the rings in the previous

T-unit or to Jupiter, the other planet introduced in T­

unit three.

Anna's problem with this piece does not have to

do with pronoun use. The text has some semantic

problems, however, because there is a different number

of~oons mentioned in each of three different instances.

From the perspective of pronoun use, what is interesting

about this text is that it is numbered like a list which

connotes that the proper noun Saturn is likely to begin

each new sentence. And the text appears to start out

this way with the repetition of Saturn at the beginning

of every line. What happens is that in the fifth T-unit

the language rule of economy wins out and the pronoun

begins to take the place of the name, even in a

situation where it's not set up to be used that way.

145

There appears to be a driving need to be more efficient;

to stop repeating the noun phrase and to replace it with

the appropriate pronoun.

Summary. In the thirteen reports written by the

students, few pronouns are used. Those that are contain

few pronoun ambiguities. There are, however, many

ambiguities related to the definite article used

exophorically to refer to something in the assignment or

in the reference material used for writing the report.

The reports are for the most part very short and

it is quite likely that in some cases parts of the texts

are direct quotes from the reference materials. This

again seems to be directly related to the assignment.

Regarding pronoun use, two strategies affected

how pronouns were used in the reports. The first was to

turn the report into a first person narrative and the

second was to turn the report into a list.

Telling About and Retelling

As in the children's reports, those narratives

written in response to a picture or other visual

stimulus contained exophoric references which served to

incorporate the picture into the written text. In other

words, for some of these young writers the picture

became part of the text.

146

An example of this is a series of texts Anna

writes early in the second year of the study. Each text

begins with this, a deictic that points to the picture.

Anna Year 2 Sept. 21

Oct. 7

Oct. 19 Oct. 26

This is Monica's house .•. ~ is a cat and a mouse .... This is Kim's house ... This is a house ...

In the following text, Elaine switches fro~ what

begins as a story to a description of the picture used

as the stimulus for the writing assignment.

Figure 9. Elaine Jan. 20, Year 2 Picture from The Day the Sioux Came to Town

147

Elaine Jan. 20, Year 2

The Day the Sioux Came to Town

One day the Sioux came to town because ~ were dancing for the people. (1) She had feathers and a stick and design rings and a feather in her hair, (2) And she was a good dancer. (3) They live way out in the desert. (4) They live in tepees. (5) They put designs on the tepees. (6) They always wear dresses. (7) The men wear moccasins and the bottom of a dress and hold a stick. (8) Feathers, too. (9) He wears bells, too and paints his arms, and wears sticks on his head and a black thing over his head and ribbons on his .9..!:.!!!.i.. (10) They are red and white. (11) And he wears feathers on his moccasins and bells on the top of the dress. (12) And ~ puts a star on his stomach (13) and ~ wears a belt, too. (14) The belt has bells, too (15) and the dress has leather hanging from the dress. (16) He paints the thing on his head and has feathers on the ribbons. (17)

In (2) and (3) there are exophoric references to

she referring to the woman in the picture and describing

what she looks like and what she is doing. T-units four

through nine go back to the narrative and then Elaine

switches again and for the rest of the text describes

the picture.

It appears that Elaine is trying to satisfy the

assignment but the picture strongly influences her and

she returns to describing it rather than telling a story

based on it.

While Elaine's text is written in response to a

picture that was part of the assignment, Gordon's text

148

that follows is written in response to a picture he has

drawn himself.

Figure 10. Gordon Oct. 7, Year 2

149

Gordon Oct. 7, Year 2

Pac Man is eating the ghost. (1) ~ Pac Man is helping Pac Man. (2) The ghosts are saying, "Help us." (3) The other ghost is saying, "I can't." (4) Mrs. Pac Man is look i ng for baby Pac Man. (5) The sun is burning the tree. (6) The tree is saying, "Ouch."(7) The next day Pac Man took baby Pac Man for a walk ;in the park. (8) Then the ghosts were catching Pac Man and baby Pack Man. (9) But Pac Man and baby Pac Man ate the ghosts up. (10)

In this text, the first seven T-units are

descriptive of the picture Gordon has drawn. The only

pronouns Gordon uses in this text are within the

dialogue. The definite article used with ghost and

ghosts in (1), (3) and (4) make up the reference miscue

in this piece. The referents are found in his drawing.

In (6), the sun is homophoric and therefore not

ambiguous but the referent for the tree is once again in

the picture.

The temporal adverbial in (8), the next day is

an attempt on Gordon's part to get the story moving and

set up a plot. But as soon as this happens, Gordon ends

the story.

Elaine's and Gordon's stories are both written

in response to pictures. Elaine's text is in response to

a picture supplied by the teacher. Gordon's text is in

response to his own drawing. While Elaine begins her

text as a story and moves to a description of the

150

picture, Gordon first describes the picture and then

begins the story. Although both texts contain reference

ambiguities, it appears as if the drawing of the picture

gives Gordon the opportunity to experiment with

dialogue. In the case of Elaine, this text is one of her

longer pieces and one she herself was very proud of. (Y.

Goodman, 1984)

Retellings

Retellings are distinctive texts because it is

assumed that there is some amount of shared knowledge

between writer and audience. This is particularly true

in assigned retellings. In these cases, it is likely

that the audience (most like1y the teacher and sometimes

the classmates) has participated in the same experience.

It was expected that a retelling of shared

information would produce more exophoric and/or

ambiguous referents. This is because of the nature of

the shared frame of reference and the principle of

economy that says to provide no more information than is

necessary. This was not the case in the student's

retellings of movies and books. Interestingly, the

assignments which asked the students to retell a film

that had recently been shown to the class were among the

most successful assignments in terms of involvement and

length on the part of the students (Y. Goodman, 1984).

151

In looking at pronoun use specifically, the proportion

of pronoun ambiguity in the rete11ings of movies is

related to the number of characters introduced and the

kinds of interactions the characters have.

As examples, pronoun use will be examined in the

rete11ings of two movies by the same two students.

Dana Nov. 10, Year 2

The Daisy

One, day a man was cut tin g s 0 m e weeds. (1) After the man got finished cutting the weeds, a daisy grew. (2) The man tried to pull the daisy out. (3) Then ~ tried to cut the daisy with his scissors. (4) But the scissors got caught. (5) The man tried to pull his scissors out. (6) When ~ pulled them out ~ were bent. (7) Then ~ tried to saw the flower down. (8) But the edge got soft. (9) Then ~ tried to flatten the daisy with a big tractor like thing. (10) But that didn't work. (11) Then ~ tried to pull the roots out. (12) But the root was too long. (13) then ~ tried to blow the daisy up. (14) But ~ blew himself up. (15) Then a little girl got it and pulled it very gently (16) and it came off. (17)

Figure 8 traces the identity chains for the man

and the daisy in Dana's text.

152

Identit~ T-Unit a man 1 a man 2 the man 3 he 4 the man 6 he 7 he 8 he 10 he 12 he 14 he 15

Identity a daisy the daisy the daisy

the flower the edge the daisy the roots the root the daisy it it it

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

10 12 13 14 16 17

T-Unit

Figure 8. Coreference in "The Daisy" by Dana

In this text, a man is introduced in (1) and

referred to as the man in (2). The noun phrase the man

is repeated in (3) because a dais~ became the subject in

(2). From that point on the pronoun ~ is always used

and always as subject except in T-unit (6) where the

noun phrase is repeated because there was a new subject

in T-unit (5).

A daisy is introduced in (2). All other

instances repeat the noun phrase the dais~ or a lexical

variation of the dais~ and always in the object position

until the final two T-units where the pronoun it is

used. This comes just after the introduction of a girl

whose presence precipitates the resolution to the story.

The way Dana uses referring expressions in his

retelling of "The Daisy" makes for a very effective

stqry.

153

daisy in

Identity

a man he the man The man he the man the man he the man

Rachel's retelling of the same movie follows:

Rachel Nov. 10, Year 2

There was once a man. (1) He was cutting plants down (2) and there was a daisv growing. (3) The man wanted to cut the daisy down (4) but ii didn't fall down. (5) The man got mad. (6) He wanted to smash the daisy. (7) But the daisy was alive. (8) And the man dug a hole and found the root (9) ii was long. (10) The man got tired. (11) He got a rope and a barrel and some matches and lit one. (12) It went boom. (13) The man was in the hospital (14) and a nice girl came and got the daisy (15) and the girl went. (16)

Figure 9 shows co-reference for the man

Rachel's text.

and

T-Unit Identity T-Unit

1 a daisy 3 2 the daisy 4 4 it 5 6 the daisy 7 7 the daisy 8 9 the root 9 11 it 10 12 the daisy 15 14

the

Figure 9. Coreference in "The Daisy" by Rachel

In Rachel's retelling, when the distance between

coreferents is greater than the subsequent T-unit, she

repeats the noun phrase. She uses the anaphoric pronoun

only when the antecedent is immediately preceding.

Another movie these same two students wrote

about is a much more complicated story with many

154

interacting characters. The movie was a cartoon of the

William Tell Story.

Here is Dana's version:

Dana Feb. 9, Year 2

The William Tell Story

The movie was about a great man. (1) Well, one day William was fixing a bow and arrow for his son's birthday. (2) When a father came to talk to William about a meeting. (3) He said, "Can you come to a meeting tonight?" (4) William sa i d, II No , because it' s my son' s . birthday," (5) so father left. (6) Then William went back to work. (7) When his son was on his way to William for lunch ~ met some men. (8) They were mean men, especially the one in the wagon. (9) The ~ was brave enough to tell them on when ~ were going to eat the goat. (10) But ~ didn't want the goat so ~ threw the goat down. (11) The boy got the goat and ran to William. (12) ~ told him all about it, then went because it was getting dark. (I3) When the got home, ~ sll celebrated his birthday (I4) and at the same night held the meeting. (15) One of them was a traitor. (16) So ~ told their master. (17) After ~ had heard ~ said, "Stand up a pole with my hat on it." (18) When ~ did everybody had to bow to it, except William. (19) When ~ caught him, .t..htl made him shoot an apple off his son's head. (20) When ~ did, he threatened the King. (21) The guards were going to kill them when the townspeople killed them. (22) After that, .t..htl celebrated his son's birthday. (23)

This is one of Dana's longer texts. It does

contain a number of reference ambiguities due primarily

to the fact that it is a retelling of a complicated

155

story with a host of male characters. Typical of Dana,

the text begins with something that gives the reader a

clue to Dana's intentions. He starts out "The movie was

about a great man." This lets the reader know that he is

about to begin a retelling and sets the scene. The use

of the definite article the movie is a signal that

referents may be recovered in the actual movie he and

the class have just seen. To continue in this vein, he

begins the second T-unit with "Well, one day William ...

also a signal to the reader that this retelling may be

lengthy and the use of well here is almost as if Dana

takes a deep breath before he begins. This usage is not

common in wr.itten language and the text does start out

much like an oral retelling might.

The first reference ambiguity in the text

involves an interchange between William and a father (T­

units (3) through (7». A father is introduced in (3)

and asks William to attend a meeting. T-unit (6) is "~

father left". It is not clear whether father here is

really Father (a priest) or whether Dana has omitted the

definite article.

The next reference ambiguity comes with the

actual introduction of William's son. William's son is

never referred to by name in this text and until (8) he

is only referred to in the possessive (e.g., his son's

156

birthday) T-unit (8) reads "when his son was on his way

to William for lunch II met some men." This is not

really ambiguous but it is slightly awkward and the

reference becomes confused with the addition of some men

in (8) who are further identified as "mean men,

especially the one in the wagon" in (9). This is an

exophoric reference to someone probably easily

identified in the movie.

In (10) William's son begins to be referred to

as the boy. The definite article is used exophorically

to introduce the goat in (10). From (10) to (12) ~

refers to the mean men and the boy refers to William's

son. In (13) pronouns are used exclusively to refer to

William and his son. "He told him all about it ... " There

are two uses of ~ in (14). The first is a miscue (the

for ~) which refers to William and his son. The

second ~ in (14) refers to more than William and his

son, "~all celebrated his birthday." From this point

on, there are several more potential pronoun ambiguities

which are clarified only by the reader's knowledge of

the story, e.g., after M had heard M said, "Stand up a

pole with my hat on it." We know from the dialogue that

this must be William speaking. Up to the very end, Dana

makes infelicitous introductions that are exophoric and

recoverable only through the movie itself, e.g., th'e

157

~ (21), the guards (22). There is also the problem in

this text of who is included in the third person plural

(The guards were going to kill them, when the

townspeople killed them, 22). The two uses of them in

this line refer to two different groups of people.

Rachel's retelling of the movie is similar in

the sense that it, too, is one of her longer texts and

it contains extensive use of dialogue.

Rachel Feb. 9, Year 2

William Tell

Once upon a time there was a place so nice. (1) There was a man. (2) His name was William. (3) He had a son and ~ was nine years old. (4) Ii was his birthday. (5) And ~ was happy. (S) The boy had ~ 9.Q.ll. (7) 1 don't know his name. (8) The boy and his goat wer~ walking (9) and some people almost ran into them. (10) But the people did not run into them. (11) ~ stopped right away and said, "Who are you?" (12) And ~ said, "I am ~ m." (I3) "What is your name?" (I4) "My name is Chris (IS) and my father is the goodest man in the world." (IS) And the people said, "Well, we will see about that (17) OK?" (18) "OK", said the boy. (19) And one man said to the goat, "You would make a good supper," said the men to the goat. (20) And the boy got scared and began to cry. (2I) But the men began to laugh. (22) But the men put the goat down (23) and one of the men had the boy too and .p U t the boy dow n, too. ( 24) And the people went. (25) The boy was crying and went home and told his father what happened (2S) and his father said, "Who were those people?" (27) "I don't know," said the boy, (28) His father was making him a bow and arrow for his birthd~

158

(29) and the boy said, "Who are you making the bow and arrow for?" said the m. (30) "For you" (31) "For me!" said the boy. (32) "Yes," said the man. (33) Then the people came and the men said, "Is this your father?" (34) "Yes" said the boy. (35) "Well, you are his father?" (36) "Yes" said the man. (37) "Well, could you put an apple on your boy's head and shoot it?" (38) "OK. OK." said the man and ~ did. (39)

Rachel's retelling has fewer reference

ambiguities than Dana's. It is also more methodical and

more complete as a text unto itself, although Dana's

text includes more concepts and subplots. Rachel spends

the first third of the text establishing reference

through identification and naming of characters.

(There was a man. (2) His name was Will i am . ( 3 ) He h ad, a son and ~ was nine years old (4) ... The boy had ~ 9Q.tl.. (7) I don't know his name. (8))

The insertion of the first person into the

narrative as in (8) is typical of Rachel.

Rachel's use of dialogue in this text is quite

extensive and this is interesting because it is the

first time Rachel uses dialogue in any of her writing.

There are several places in the text where there are

double dialogue carriers (And one man said to the goat,

"You would make a good super," said the man to the goat

(20) And the boy said, "Who are you making the bow and

arrow for?" said the boy (30)) Aside from the instances,

Rachel uses dialogue in this text very effectively and

159

she seems to be experimenting with different ways of

expressing direct speech in writing.

Summary. The use of" visual stimuli to encourage

or motivate the children to write had both negative and

positive effects. The use of pictures did tend to

increase the use of exophoric referents in the sense

that definite articles and pronouns were used to refer

to antecedents in the pictures. In this sense, the texts

were not cohesive. On the other hand, pictures and

movies did tend to influence the children to write

longer and more descriptive texts. They also seemed to

allow the young writers to experiment with other

features important in written language such as the use

of descriptive modification and d~~logue. The movies in

particular, perhaps because of the moving action, also

produced increased use of temporal expressions.

First Person Narratives

In written language, the author can be but does

not have to be the referent for the first person pronoun

-- an identity that cannot be found within he text and

is, therefore, exophoric. In the children's writing

there are degrees to which the referents for the first

person pronouns can be more or less easily identified.

To account for these differences the analysis of the

160

first person narratives yielded the following

categories:

1. ·Personal Narratives - self reference in an

expressive narrative having to do with the writer's true

personal experiences or events in daily.life written in

the first person singular or plural. e.g., I went to my

friend's house and we play catch.

2. Collective Narratives - relating a common

experience shared by the author and at least one other

person (usually from the class) and begun in the first

person plural. e.g., We went to the Arizona Sonora

Desert Museum.

3. Fictional Narratives - a fictional story

based on a central imaginary character (who can become

the narrator or supern~tural event and written in the

first person singular or plural. e.g., One day when I

was walking in the woods I saw a monster.

4. Assignments of the sort "Put yourself in the

place of and tell about it." - usually based on a

unit of study and called here "Imagine 'I'". e.g., If

lived in Switzerland I wish that I lived over there.

161

Anna Dana Elaine Gordon Rachel Vincent

Table 16 Types of First Person Narratives

Personal Narrative

8 5

11 9 2 9

Collective Narrative

1 2 7 1 1 1

Fictional­Narrative

6 3 1 4 8 4

Imagine " I"

3 o 3 1 2 2

Table 16 shows the number of each type of first

person narrative each child wrote. Dana, in many ways

the most skilled writer (Y. Goodman, 1984), avoids the

"Imagine 'I'" type of assignment altogether. On the

other hand both Anna and Elaine, the least proficient

writers (Y. Goodman, 1984), rely most heavily on the

wording of the assignment and are most constrained by

it.

It was expected that the farther away from

personal narrative the writers went, the greater the

probability for pronoun ambiguity would become due to

increasing levels of abstraction necessary for the

identity of the first person pronoun.

This was not the case in these children's

writing. In the "Imagine 'I'" assignments, there were

not more ambiguities in actual pronoun use than in other

162

types of first person narratives. There were, however,

some interesting strategies at work for dealing with the

assignments.

Anna March 30, Year 1

When 1 was in Switzerland in the winter ~ have a horn that calls the cows home (1) And ~ have skiis like ~ (2) And ~ do not have houses like as (3) Their house~ are big and on the top it is big. (4) Their mountains are not like ours (5) Thl~ are hilly (6) They are not like ~. (7)

In thi3 dxt, Anna immediately switches to the

third person (they) after the initial use of the first

person (I). She proceeds to turn the text into a third

person narrative and uses comparison to satisfy the

assignment. Because Anna may not understand the function

of this assignment, it is not possible for her to

maintain the form.

Another strategy for dealing with the "Imagine

I ... " assignments is to introduce dialogue as

illustrated in the following example:

Gordon March 30, Year 1

One day when I went to Switzerland and saw lots of h~uses and buildings. (1) As I was walking down the street a man said, "Do you live here?" (2) I said, "No."(3) He said, "Oh."

By using dialogue, the 1 in this text is free to

carryon an ordinary conversation and it removes the

163

situation from having to deal with what 1 would be like

in Switzerland as opposed to anywhere else. The and in

(1) is also interesting. This could be a miscue of and

for 1 which again points out how restrictive the

assignment is.

In the 94 first person narratives the children

wrote, there are few instances of first person pronoun

ambiguity. Collective narratives and personal ~arratives

written in the first person plural have an inherent

probability for ambiguity because of who is included in

the we. This, however, is not problematic for the

students. When a personal narrative was written in the

first person plural, the we was usual'ly specified at

some point in the text. There is only one instance where

we becomes ambiguous because of the introduction into

the text of an additional character.

Anna April 28, Year 2

One summer day our family went to Rocky Point. (1) It took about three hours. (2) We saw Mr. Mn . (3) He was a nice man. (4) We told ghost stories and roasted marshmallows. (5)

In this text, the _reader does not know if the we

in (5) includes Mr. M ____ or not and it doesn't really

make the story less meaningful.

164

There are several instances where a piece starts

off with the first person singular and at some point

switches to the first person plural.

Anna April 7, Year 2

One day 1 went to the Arizona 83 Fair. (1) We had lots of fun. (2) We went in the haunted house. (3) Our whole family was scared to go in the haunted house ...

Vincent Feb. 2, Year 2

One day 1 went to go pick bahitac. (1) We use cactus ribs. (2) But we have to use long cactus ribs. (3) Most of the time it is just me and my mother ...

In both of these cases, there are two

intervening T-units betw~en the initial 1 and the place

where the ~ is specified. What is noteworthy here is

that what starts out as ambiguous due to unspecified

inclusion in we becomes clear after some amount of

continued writing. This points out that these young

writers do indeed monitor their own writing and are

aware of when they need to specify particular referents.

On the other hand, in the Collective Narratives

the ~ is never specified. These pieces are narratives

telling about an event or series of events that involves

the class or some part of the class. In these instances,

the children do not find it necessary to specify the we

because it is clear to whom we refers from the

165

assignment (e.g. Write about our class trip to the

Desert Museum and tell what you liked about it.) In

these narratives ~ is retained as the subject during

the telling of events and is switched to 1 when value

judgments are made. In the following example of

Rachel's, the assignment is adhered to very strictly:

Rachel April 13, Year 2

When we went to the Desert Museum we walked for a long time. (1) Then we saw some wolves. (2) The wolves were playing around. (3) They looked very hungry. (4) We saw one snake and we touched the snake. (5) The snake felt bumpy. (6) What I liked best? (7) I liked the cave. (8)

One other kind of unusual pronoun use exists in

these first person narratives. This is the category of

slips of the pen, where a momentary lapse of some sort

results in an unexpected written product. These writing

miscues do not involve any meaning change or ambiguity.

If the writing is edited at all these miscues

are usually corrected. Since these texts are all first

drafts little editing or revision has taken place. In

the first person narratives the children wrote there are

only three which are:

1. A repet it ion

Anna March 24, Year 2

One day I day I was in the grand drawing for the Arizona lottery ...

166

This miscue is a false start where Anna begins

the piece, temporarily looses her place and begins

again.

2. An omission

Dana April 13, Year 2

... we satl beaver traps and skins. We saw the birds next. After that we saw a bear. Then Q saw a jack rabbit and wild pig.

In this case the omission miscue comes after an

established pattern of we as the subject followed by

some kind of action. The place where the miscue occurs

fits in with this pattern exactly. The ~ is omitted

probably because Dana thought he had written it and was

hurrying to get to the object of the sentence. It is

also possible that this is an attempt to combine

sentences in which case the pronoun would not be needed.

~. Pronoun maintenance

Dana Nov. 17, Year 2

One day I went to the rodeo. (I) When got to the rodeo. (2) I man getting bucked off a wild horse. (3)

In this example, Dana's punctuation has been

retained. The first line is a standard beginning for a

text. The second line is an adverbial dependent clause

but Dana puts a period at the end of it. In (3) he uses

1 as the subject because it was used in the previous two

lines. The miscue occurs because the syntactic pattern

167

he has established might call for a continuation of 1 as

subject but his probable intent is to introduce a new

character (a man).

Summary. The children's first person narratives

contained very few ambiguous pronouns. Most unusual

pronoun use can be tied to unusual assignments, i.e.,

"Imagine I".

Switches in person were common in the first

person narratives but in most cases the switches did not

interfere with meaning.

168

CHAPTER 7

CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

This chapter will return to the original research

questions and discuss them in light of the analysis set

forth in Chapter 4.

Questions

Question One: What is the nature and extent of

pronouns used in the children's writing?

This question comprises the quantative analysis

and was answered by looking at the distribution and

frequency of pronouns in the children's writing. The

findings are as expected; these beginning writers do

employ the full range of pronoun use. Although this

finding may seem obvious, the original impetus for the

study was to document this.

Some of the reading studies cited in the

literature review suggest that: 1) children have

trouble comprehending anaphora (e.g., Bormuth, et. al.,

1970; Richek, 1976); 2) that the comprehension of

anaphora is developmental (e.g., Barnitz, 1979; Chapman,

1979); and 3) that direct instruction of anaphoric

relationships will lead to improved reading

comprehension (e.g., Bauman and Stevenson,. 1986).

Reading studies involving miscue analysis

challenge these views (at least in terms of pronominal

169

anaphora) suggesting rather that; 1) the percentage of

miscues on pronouns is quite small; 2) is not

developmental per se; and 3) direct instruction of

anaphoric relationships is unnecessary and can even be

confusing (Goodman and Gespass, 1983; Pollock, 1985;

Freeman, 1986, 1988).

The current study on the writing of six third and

fourth .graders established that these children do use

pronouns in their writing and further, that they control

and manipulate antecedent/anaphora relationships quite

effectively.

If we believe that the construction of meaning is

tantamount in both reading and wr~ting, then the

appropriate production of pronouns in the children's

writing implies that they most certainly comprehend

anaphoric relationships. Thus, the results of studies

that state otherwise, must be attributed to factors

implicit in the research design (i.e., texts that are

short, highly contrived, syntactically peculiar, boring)

rather than to the linguistic knowledge or thought

processes of the readers.

From the perspective of production, the current

research confirms that young writers do not have

difficulty exprerssing coreference through the use of

pronominal anaphora.

170

In summary, the findings related to this question

are:

1) The children's pronoun use was 15.64% of the

total words they wrote, somewhat higher than those found

in professionally authored texts.

2) Pronouns were used most often as nominatives

and least often as objects.

3) First person and third person pronouns were

used in approximately the same proportion while second

person pronouns were used less often.

4) Personal pronouns were used about eight times

more often than proper names.

Question Two: How do the linguistic constraints

of the text affect the writer's use and choice of

pronouns?

This question was addressed primarily by looking

at reference miscues in the children's writing. It must

be remembered that these accounted for a very small

percentage of the total running words (about two

percent). It was expected (Bartlett and Scribner, 1980)

that when there were two or more same-six, same-age

characters interacting in the text that it would be more

difficult for the young writers to avoid ambiguity. This

expectation was only partially met. There were several

cases where this was true and several cases where it

171

wasn't. Because of the small number of texts involved

that met these criteria, the results cannot be

generalized.

Switches in both number and person were quite

common. The young writers did not appear to view these

switches as unusual or ambiguous. Gender switches

involved the neuter exclusively. There was also a

tendency to switch from the neuter when the subject was

an animal referred to initially as ii. In subsequent

references, a sex, usually the masculine, was assigned.

Specifying who was included in they or we was

seldom a problem for the children except when ~ was

used as a generalized exophoric referent. In these

cases, as well as in the cases where there is a non­

explicit antecedent for ii, concentrations of reference

miscues did occur.

The young writers apparently had no difficulty

with pronoun use within dialogue passages.

There was also some evidence to suggest that

struggles with spelling or punctuation influenced

pronoun use but this was not specifically investigated.

The less proficient writers did tend to be more

influenced by the linguistic structures that were

readily available to them (e.g., assignments, story

starters, questions) and if those became embodied in

172

their own texts, pronoun use was affected. It must be

remembered that this conclusion relates to a small

number of problems.

Question Three: How does the general context of

the situation affect the writer's choice and use of

pronouns?

This question turned out to be the most

significant one in terms of understanding reference

miscues. The expectation was that genre would influence

the number and degree of pronoun ambiguities. The

findings do support this expectation but not in a clear­

cut way. It is true that those genres with which the

children had the least experience such as report writing

did contain a higher proportion of reference miscues or

ambiguities. But these texts also had problems totally

unrelated to reference in general or pronoun use

specifically. In addition, it seemed as if in srme

instances within the same genre a writer would have no

trouble designating reference and at other times he or

she would. Upon closer examination, it became evident

that genre alone was not influencing pronoun use and

choice. Rather, it was genre in conjunction with

specific writing assignments. For example, when Dana

wrote a sports report about a basketball game, he made

no reference miscues but when he was assigned to write a

173

report about the state flag, reference miscues were

present.

In summary, the children tended to make the

entire writing context part of the text. In this way all

aspects of the assignment (i.e., both the language of

the assignment itself and any visual stimuli) became

part of the text. Thus, there was an extremely broad

context in which the referents to pronouns could be

discovered and assigned. In this way, the entire context

of situation was influential in regard to the choice of

pronouns.

In addition, the purposes of writing affected use

and choice of pronouns. When the writing was for a real

purpose, the texts tended to be more cohesive and

pronoun use was most predictable.

Finally, the writer's sense of audience did

affect use and choice of pronouns, but again, not in a

clear-cut way. It was expected that as the young writers

developed more awareness of audience, their writing

would contain fewer reference miscues. From the

perspective of pronoun use, there seemed to be a

pronounced distinction between the writer's ability to

monitor his or her own writing and the writer's

understanding of his or her audience. In other words,

the young writers seemed to be perfectly well aware of

174

their intended audience (the teacher for the most part)

and did not see the necessity for supply information or

knowledge that they knew the audience would share.

Because of this, the awareness of audience seemed to

promote an overgeneralization of the principle of

economy and therefore, the use of more reference

miscues.

On the other hand, (this is speculative because

the present study did not directly examine writing

behaviors) it seemed as if when some monitoring of the

writing process was done consciously (as in re-reading

and revising the text), the writers made more attempts

to clarify pronoun referents.

Question Four: What strategies does the writer

use to govern the choice and use of pronouns?

The expectation was that the writers would

conform to the principle of economy and use pronouns

wherever possible, thus avoiding redundancy by

unnecessary repetition of the noun phrase. The analyses

confirmed this. Not only did the writers adhere to the

principle of economy, they also overgeneralized it.

These developing writers did tend to use more pronouns

because, as is always the case, the degree of ambiguity

a pronoun has is dependent on the reader, not the

writer. For the writer, the referent for the pronoun can

175

never be ambiguous. There was also a tendency for

several of the children to overcompensate for this

overgeneralization and repeat noun phrases or proper

names in places where it would not ordinarily be

necessary. It is also possible that the repetition of

the noun phrase may have been influenced by the type of

reading the children did, primarily in basal reading

programs.

Other strategies that the young writers used

regarding pronoun use were to:

1) Insert a generalized exophoric ~ or

it in order to end a piece.

2) Start naming characters in order to

clarify.

3) Keep writing; the more information you

include the easier it is for the reader to

generate a coherent hypothesis.

4) Use a pronoun when it's the subject

and the name or noun phrase when it's the

object in order to clarify and be

consistent.

5) Use the possessive determiner to

strengthen and emphasize a chain of

coreference.

176

Question Five: In what ways does the developing

writer gain control over the use of pronouns?

The expectation was that as the writer became

more aware of the audience, there would be fewer

reference miscues in the writing.

As discussed earlier, it appears as though this

expectation was met although the evidence is somewhat

speculative. In the chronological examination of the

children's third person narratives, the number of

reference ambiguities did decrease in the second year of

the study but the reasons for this are not clear. In

many ways the assignments the children had in the first

year of the study were more highly constrained and as

discussed above, the entire assignment became part of

the text. As a result, these texts did have more

reference miscues than those the children produced in

the second year of the study.

The number and kind of pronouns used by the

children did not change much from the first year to the

second year. What did change was the number of reference

miscues. In the first year there were 2.29 reference

miscues per 100 words while in the second year there

were 1.61 miscues per hundred words.

It appears that as the children developed as

writers, reference miscues did decrease but because of

177

the different kinds of writing they were doing, this

finding cannot be directly attributed to development.

Implications for Instruction and

Suggestions for Further Research

This study examined six children's use and

control of pronouns while they were in third and fourth

grades. The results showed that they understood and

controlled all aspects of reference in their writing.

The study also explored the circumstances under which

ambiguous or unclear use of pronouns occurred.

It is my hope that this study can make a

contribution to both theory and practice.

The implications this study has for practice are:

1. The direct teaching of antecedent/anaphor

relationships is not only unnecessary but actually

counter-productive because of the unnatural focus on

something that is already controlled.

2. If writing assignments are given, it is likely

that the assignment will become embodied in the

student's text. Therefore, assignments must be examined

carefully and support what the students can do already.

3. Students must be encouraged to write authentic

texts with a personal voice, a stance of their own

choosing and preferably a topic of their own choosing.

178

4. Peer editing should be encouraged in order to

expand the writer's sense of audience. This would also

serve to provide the writer with the reader's

perspective.

5. Students should be encouraged to write texts

over a period of time in order to fine-tune the strategy

of disambiguating and provide for more developed self­

monitoring.

6. Teachers should be encouraged to discover

innovative ways to use and discuss different genres in

the classroom.

In essence, all of these implications support and

confirm the strength of writing-process classrooms

(e.g., Graves, 1983; Calkins, 1981; Hanson, 1985;

Atwell, 1986).

As is the case with much exploratory research,

this study generated more questions that it answered.

Some of the more interesting suggestions for further

research include:

1. A direct investigation of the relationship of

assignments to choice of pronouns.

2. A study that examines specifically the editing

of pronouns and other referring expressions.

3. The development of a taxonomy of reference

miscues.

179

4. An extension of this study to include other

types of anaphora.

5. Investigations of all sorts that explore the

writing development of different genres.

6. A direct investigation of pronoun use in

written retellings.

7. An exploration of the difference of pronoun

use in writing that stems from a picture produced by the

student as opposed to a picture supplied by the teacher.

180

R~ftrmllal SlalUS: Intraduclol}'

1 2 3 12

noun J?hrau

Amlin Jim her purse the batteries

Referl!ntlal slalW: phorlc

sentenCl! numb~r

4 6 8 9 II.

noun phrasl!

he the car the two the boy

. this paper

APPENDIX A

Categories for Noun Phrases

linguistic form

inderlnite + noun proper name possessive + noun definite + noun (inferred)

linguisllc form

pronoun . definite + noun

definitc + noun definite + noun demonstrative + noun

new or repealed wording

new repeated .

repeated (elidc'!) new new

locallon of re/erent

previous text previous' text previous text . previous text .

173

. communicat!9n"iit~t!o~:

REFERENCES

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