The purpose of this study is to examine linguistic features of the narratives composed by middle and high school students, based on the stories at story-telling contests. It might be expected that students' story-telling at the contests would be somew...
The purpose of this study is to examine linguistic features of the narratives composed by middle and high school students, based on the stories at story-telling contests. It might be expected that students' story-telling at the contests would be somewhat different from their daily story-telling. As it turned out, however, most of the narratives in the First Story-telling Contest were found to have the general features of spoken language, because the participants were reciting their stories from their memory, not from their manuscripts. The linguistic features discussed in this study are summarized as follows:
(1) Morphological Features
Students' narratives were found to contain many reduced forms: reduced forms for nouns, pronouns, words with declined endings, combined forms of base and auxiliary declinable words, adverbs, adjective stems, postpositional words.
It was found that the dependent noun form 'geot' was realized as 'geo/ggeo.' And the combined form of 'eo'(the auxiliary connective ending) and '-eo gajigo/-eo gotgo'(declined form of 'gajida') was used in the same function as 'eoseo,' and was getting established as an ending.
(2) Syntactic Features
Students' narratives were shown to contain some syntactic features different from those of written language, since story-telling presupposes an audience.. Among those syntactic features were spoken expressions, listener-oriented expression, and ill-formed structures.
(3) Lexical Features
In their story-telling, students tended to misuse words due to the context-dependent nature of their narration. In addition, vulgar expressions and slangs were unsparingly used because of their lack of control over emotions and thoughts. And words of foreign origin were overused in their story-telling.
(4) Discourse Features
In general spoken language sounds unrefined and haphazard because colloquial speech tend to include repeated and redundant words and phrases. students' narratives were shown to contain specific discourse marker, as is usually the case with spoken language. The discourse structure of narratives consists of the three parts the introduction, the body, and the closing. Most of the students' narratives were not well organized in discourse construction or contents, and they tended to be lacking in integration and cohesion due to the insertion of irrelevant episodes into their stories.