Lists as Alternative Discourse Structures to Narratives in Preschool Children’s Conversation

This study examines a corpus of conversations of Turkish preschool-age children with adults, with the goal of analyzing 2 types of extended discourse structures (i.e., lists and narratives). Lists and narratives are compared with respect to (a) their internal structures, and (b) their social functions in the participants’ daily interactions. The analyses suggest that although lists and narratives differ on structural grounds, they overlap in the functions they serve for the tellers. Lists constitute more of a descriptive structure, although temporality is foregrounded in narratives. Yet, both genres are used to express strips of past experience, and are employed by the same child in similar contexts, framed by similar metadiscourse comments, often blending into another. These findings suggest that, although lists and narratives are revealed as 2 clearly differentiable genres on formal analyses, lists carry some features of narrativity in children’s conversational interactions.