El valor del presente histórico en narrativas infantiles; orales y escritas

Abstract

The function of the historical present in spoken (oral) and written narratives of nine year old children that live in Buenos Aires city was analyzed in this work. The narratives were elicited from a text literary source whose characteristic does not make foreseeable the apperanee of this verbal tense. The qualitative and quantitative analysis of the corpus (37 spoken —oral— texts and 50 written texts) does not permit to associate the use of the historical present neither with the strategy of beginning of the story (Marro & Rosenberg; 1991); nor with its presence in specific narrative propositions (Silva Corvalan; 1987). However; the analysis showed a trend towards its use in action sequences. Furthermore in the written texts writing constraints the use of this verbal tense.