Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
LINGUA, cilt.279, ss.1-16, 2022 (SSCI)
The use of contrast markers (CMs), one important type of connective creating semantic
links both within and beyond the sentence (Robertson, 1968), is an explicit way of text
cohesion (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) which develops gradually in childhood as logical
reasoning advances (Piaget, 1928). This paper investigates the developmental
trajectory of CMs in English across four grade levels to understand a particular aspect
of language acquisition, that is ‘expressing various types of contrast’. We aim to reveal
how frequently and diversely CMs are employed by children and report the differences
between the overall use and that of the most frequent CMs across grade levels and
types of texts. Through a frequency-based quantitative approach and contextual
analyses, a set of 65 CMs constructed drawing on several existing taxonomies were
searched in the Growth in Grammar (GiG) Corpus (Durrant & Brenchley, 2018), a
corpus of school writing produced by children at schools in England from Year 2 to
Year 11. The results show that the variety and the number of CMs increase across
grade levels signalling a significant change as they get older. We also found that the
frequencies of CMs differed significantly both across grade levels and genres of writing
(literary vs. non-literary texts) in the corpus. In addition, it is noteworthy to evidence
that the frequency of overall use of CMs significantly varied between Y2-Y6; Y6-Y9 and
Y6-Y11, suggesting that Y6 (ages 10-11) stands in the middle of the V-shaped
developmental curve. The findings also indicated that there are significant differences
in the most frequent CMs (i.e., but, yet, and although) for each grade level.