Use of verb tenses in children’s narratives

Abstract

The present research aims to establish the changes that occur in the uses of verb tenses in two types of narratives of children in the late acquisition stage: story telling from images and recount. For the analysis, the narratives were sorted into clauses, and verb tenses were classified (Rojo & Veiga, 1999). Verb tenses were classified according to the proposals of Weinrich (1974) and Bassols & Torrent (1997) and clauses according to the section of the narrative structure (Labov & Waletzky, 1967). The results revealed a difference according to the stimulus used to elicit the narratives. The past tense is the only verb tense present in all sections of the structure of narratives of the story corpus based on images. This finding suggests that most actions are presented as complete events, giving a retrospective character to the narrative. For its part, in the recount corpus, past perfect is the only tense found in all sections of the narrative structure, which suggests that these are past events that lead to the main complication of the story.