The development of serial verb constructions in Thai children's narrative

Abstract

To investigate the development of serial verb constructions (SVCs) in Thai children. This study is based on the narratives called 'Thai Frog Story' (Zlatev and Yangklang; 2001). The corpus consists of 50 narratives from 5 age groups: 4, 6, 9, 11 years old and adults, with 10 narratives per group. The framework used in analysis of syntactic and semantic characteristics of SVCs were the study of "Serial Verb Constructions in Thai" (Thepkanjana; 1986). Clauses in the narratives are classified into 2 types, regarding their predicates: single verb clauses and serial verb clauses. It is found, in developmental terms, that the percentage of single verb clauses decreases as children grow older. On the other hand, the percentage of serial verb clauses increases with age. Regarding the semantic characteristics, SVCs found in the data can be classified into 9 types: 1) Directional SVCs 2) Purposive SVCs 3) Aspectual SVCs 4) Mental State SVCs 5) Causative SVCs, 6) Sequential SVCs 7) Manner SVCs 8) Resultative SVCs 9) Passive SVCs and 10) Postural SVCs. All ten types of SVCs are found in every age group. This means that SVCs emerge long before 4 years old. According to the development of each type of SVCs, we can see that the percentage of Directional SVCs decreases as the children grow older. On the other hand, the percentage of Purposive SVCs, Causative SVCs, and Mental State SVCs increases with age. The percentage of Resultative SVCs, Manner SVCs, and Aspectual SVCs varies over time. The percentage of Sequential SVCs in 4 years old group are the highest. And the percentage of Passive SVCs and Postural is very low, so we can say little about their developmental patterns. When considering the ten types of SVCs, I found that some of them have common features and can be classified into four main classes: 1) Spatial sequence class, 2) Temporal sequence class, 3) Modifying class, and 4) Grammatical cline. According to the developmental aspect of these SVC classes, we can see that the percentage of Spatial sequence class tends to decrease as the children grow older, whereas the percentage of Temporal sequence class tends to increase with age. And the percentage of Modifying class and Grammatical cline seems to change very little. In the analysis of the complexity of SVCs, it is found that the percentage of complex SVCs increases with age. In addition, the degree of complexity of SVCs determined by the number of SVCs embedded in complex SVCS increases with age.