The paired clauses in the evolution of the knowledge about writt en language of elementary school students

Abstract

The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of grammatical development in school aged children, particularly the use of complex syntactic structures that we call paired predications, sets of two predications that make up a structural and semantically restricted sequence. The materials belong to the SELENE corpus (Sistema para el Estudio de la Lengua Escrita). We analyzed 120 texts written by 30 Mexican primary school students. We studied three different discursive genres: description, narration and argumentation. The data shows that the textual genre and the specific characteristics of the writing task proposed to the students affect the frequency and type of paired predications and that the acquisition of these syntactic structures presents a period of increase in frequency and structural diversity, followed by some stabilization.