Syntactic complexity: Modality or text type? A case study of 5th graders’ textual production

Abstract

Syntactic complexity has preferably been studied in written texts, thus relegating exploration of syntactic relations in different types of texts and their constitutive phases to second place. The case study herein presents inquires into the syntactic complexity in self-initiated discourses and its connection to communicative mode and text sequence. Samples were gathe-red from the oral and written narrations and explanations produced by four fifth-graders who where presented with two audiovisual stimuli. This elicited discourse was segmented and codified according to clause packa-ging and clauses. Findings suggest that oral narrative texts are longer and have a greater lexical diversity than written explanatory texts. It was also found that narrative texts present interclausal syntactic complexity unlike explanatory texts, which contain intraclausal relations as a strategy for condensing and packaging information within the clause. The most widely used interclausal relations were both symmetrical parataxis with which the participants constructed their narrations and hypotaxis as a means to construct explanations. Pedagogical implications for text production are derived from this analysis.