英语论文网

in cohesion and the scores in each coherence element are concluded as descriptive statistics to shed light on children’s narrative performance. Furthermore, a detailed analysis on narrative samples, which supplements the findings from descriptive statistics, is also conducted so as to provide a full picture of autistic children’s narrative ability in cohesion and coherence. 

Chapter Two  Literature Review

2.1 Definitions

2.1.1Definition of Narrative

From the perspective of etymology, the word ‘narrative’ is derived from a Latin word ‘narrativus’, which means “telling a story”; The word ‘narrate’, which means ‘relate’ or ‘tell’, originates from a Latin word ‘narrare’. Given these, the key implication of narrative is initially ‘narration’ or ‘story’. However, narrative incorporates different definitions in different research fields as the narrative study develops in depth. 

In the field of linguistics, Labov (1972) is the pioneer in narrative study. He defined narrative as a combination of two or more independent clauses to describe a real or virtual event in chronological order. In addition, narrative discourse connects different language components into a complete and logical story (Hao, et al., 2018), which requires narrators to possess overall knowledge about events and story elements, select proper words, sentences, verb tense and linguistic connectives, and memorize specific story episodes (Shapiro & Hudison, 1991). Narratology of Structuralism, focusing on the internal characteristics of narrative discourse, studies the genre of narrative text and expounds how these internal elements are effectively integrated into a cohesive and coherent whole (Sang & Zhang, 2014). 

2.2 Evaluative Criteria to Narrative

Every narrative, whether in oral or written form, is meaningful and informative. For a better understanding of the events, the narrative should be analyzed in detail (Karadeniz, 2017). Analyzing different narratives involves different theories and approaches accordingly (Kuzu, 2016). From the perspective of text linguistics, narrators are expected to meet two main challenges in producing a narrative: cohesion and coherence. 

2.2.1 Cohesion

In terms of cohesion, the taxonomy of the cohesion devices put forward by Halliday and Hasan (1976) in Cohesion in English is widely used in a large number of academic studies, both at home and abroad (e.g., Karadeniz, 2017; Çetin & Bayat, 2020; Cui, 1997; Xu, 2000;). According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), cohesive devices can be divided into five categories: reference, substitution, ellipsis, conjunction and lexical cohesion. Based on them, Shapiro and Hudison (1991) evaluated the cohesion of children’s oral narratives from the following two major levels: interclausal connectives (additive, continuative, adversative-causal and temporal connectives) and pronoun strategies (confused strategy, general strategy, nominal strategy, thematic-subject strategy, anaphoric strategy, indeterminable). In another study by Shapiro (1990), in addition to those two aspects, he added the intraclausal connectives (prepositional phrase and relational clause) into cohesion evaluation. Koutsoftas and Petersen (2017) assessed children’s written narrative from referential ties (personal, demonstrative and comparative) and conjunctive ties (additive, a本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。