Text analysis

Every human being has been a child at some point of time in their life –
there is no denying that, it is a biological fact – and children, being representatives
of the Homo sapiens, communicate. However, it is rather obvious that their speech
is not the same as the one adults have. Therefore, having started studying
linguistics, it seemed both entertaining and practical to analyse children’s discourse
and to point out the linguistic peculiarities of their communication from a scientific
point of view, which why it has become the subject of this analysis.

Starting with the graphological peculiarities, it is noteworthy that there

appears to be no punctuation in the text: neither commas nor dots are used to
separate different clauses (as in ‘…there was a haunted house no one went to the
castle’). Moreover, even though it is hardly distinguishable, as the text is in
handwriting, there are no capital letters in the text (or, perhaps, vice versa – no
lowercase letters) – it is not easy to determine which one it is, as sometimes the
same letter is written differently in different words (for example, ‘t’ in ‘to’ is
written as a lowercase letter, and ‘t’ in ‘ghost’ is written as an uppercase letter). In
addition, the word ‘spereit’(spirit) is circled, which helps the reader understand that
this ‘spereit’ is the main subject of the story and is very important for the narration
– the drawing following the text that shows this ‘spereit’ at its finest only supports
this idea.

As for phonological features, it is important to point out that the

pronunciations of some words used by Omar are somewhat similar to the
pronunciation of the words he intended to use, but their spelling is wrong (‘ones a
pone tieem’ instead of ‘once upon a time’). This phenomenon is quite common
among childeren1, as studies suggest that the basic knowledge any speaker has
about the word he or she wants to produce is its phonological outline, its initial
sound and usually its number of syllables (it can be seen that all the words in
Omar’s text meet this conditions) – therefore, when a person uses an uncommon
word (and in case of a child it is assumed that almost every word is uncommon –in
Omar’s text only rather simple and very frequent words like ‘into’, ‘to’, ‘the’ are
spelt correctly, whereas words ‘spirit’ and ‘because’ are not) he or she is prone to
making a mistake, producing a word that is phonologically similar to the one they
initially intended to use, but in some ways different.

Looking at the lexical features, it can be said that, rather expectedly, the
vocabulary is very limited. Even though the text is not very big and it’s incorrect to
make serious conclusions about Omar’s lexicon, it is rather unlikely that any child
possesses the skill or knowledge to produce an explicit text with vivid vocabulary.
In addition, no adjectives or adverbs are used in the text to describe objects or
actions, however, Omar substitutes his lack of descriptive skills with a drawing,
which helps the reader to form an image close to the one imagined by the author.

Lastly, grammatical peculiarities. To begin with, there are no perfect or

continuous forms in the text – in fact, Omar only uses past simple and present
simple forms. Secondly, there is no nominalization and all the verbs are active –
this is, perhaps, because passive constructions are more complicated to
comprehend, especially for a child. In addition, the constructions of the sentences
are very simple, mostly consisting of one subject and one predicate presented by a
noun and a verb. Although it’s hard to say anything about the syntax, as there is no
punctuation and it’s impossible to conclude how Omar divided the text into
sentences, it can be seen that he is capable of creating complex ones as well (‘no
one went to the castle because of the spirit’). Moreover, the text appears to be
coherent and cohesive: there is repetition (‘spirit’ and ‘spirit’), but there is also a
small slip on Omar’s side – what he calls a ‘hntb houes’ in the first sentence
becomes a ‘casel’ in the second one.

Summing up, it is important to point out that most of the linguistic features
of children’s texts are determined by their age and, probably, lack of education. It
is rather understandable that they can’t use complex grammar or syntax, as they
haven’t been taught that at their schools and they can’t operate a wide range of
vocabulary, as there are simply a lot of words they haven’t yet encountered, which
is why pictures are quite common in children’s texts, as they help them express
something they can’t yet express with words. Moreover, even the fact that the
words they use are often only phonologically similar to the ones they want to use
has a lot to do with age – in fact, such mistakes can be made even by adults, only
not so often, because their left hemisphere and the part of it responsible for speech
(Broca’s area, Wernicke’s area, the motor cortex and the arcuate fasciculus)1 are
fully developed.

List of references:

1) Yule, G. The Study of Language (6th edition) [Electronic resource],

2014, 174-183 p.p. URL:
https://assets.cambridge.org/97811071/52991/frontmatter/9781107152991_frontm
atter.pdf