the voices within narratives

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The voices within narratives:The development ofintertextuality in youngchildren's storiesDennie Wolf a & Deborah Hicks ba Project Zero , Harvard Graduate School ofEducation , Longfellow Hall, 13 Appian Way,Cambridge, MA, 02138b Harvard Graduate School of EducationPublished online: 11 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Dennie Wolf & Deborah Hicks (1989) The voices withinnarratives: The development of intertextuality in young children's stories,Discourse Processes, 12:3, 329-351, DOI: 10.1080/01638538909544734

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01638538909544734

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DISCOURSE PROCESSES 12, 329-351 (1989)

The Voices within Narratives: TheDevelopment of Intertextuality in

Young Children's StoriesDENNIE WOLF

DEBORAH HICKSHarvard Graduate School of Education

In recent years we've come to understand how fully even young speakers acquire morethan grammar, learning, in addition, how language is used variously across differentregisters and genres. However, young speakers are learning more than the rules of babytalk or story telling. They are discovering that naturally occurring speech is a rich mix ofvoices and forms, where the moves between perspectives and kinds of text conveymeaning as certainly as the words do. In the following paper, we use longitudinal observa-tions of children's narratives to describe how this occurs.

INTRODUCTION: INTERTEXTUALITY

In the study of discourse perhaps no concept is more familiarand still in-completely understoodthan that of variation. There is the variation we recog-nize as the signature of different communities of speakers and writers. This is thekind of variation that makes some speakers address a listener as an intimate,while others assume he is a stranger, or which leads the members of one commu-nity to expect silence from its children while, not far away, other parents primetheir children in the art of storytelling. Even to describe the discourse of languageusers from the same community, we need the notion of variation. Without it, wecould not capture the subtle ways in which speakers and writers tune theirlanguage to changes in audience or task. We vary the phonological contours ofour speech depending on how formal or informal we perceive our circumstancesto be (Labov, 1972a; Wolfram & Fasold, 1974). We vary the complexity of whatwe say depending on whether we are talking to a baby, a child, or an adult. Oursensitivity to genre allows us to reformat an account of "what happened lastnight" depending on whether we give an eyewitness report to Sargent Smith or aslightly embroidered first person narrative to Jake from downstairs (Bruner,1986; Fowler, 1982; Langer, 1986).

This paper is the result of equal work between both authors.The research reported in this paper was supported by funding from the Carnegie Corporation of

New York.Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Dennie Wolf, Project Zero, HGSE,

Longfellow Hall, 13 Appian Way, Cambridge, MA 02138.

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Yet there is still another sort of variation in language use of which we seem tobe less aware: This is a kind of variation within the performances of speakers andwriters which we will call intertextuality. When we look closely at sophisticatedtexts, whether they come out of novels or someone's vivid oral rendition ofexperience, what we find is that such texts are inevitably compounds of a numberof different strands or voices. Consider this segment taken from Henry James'novel, The Awkward Age:

. . . she went on before he had spoken. "I know how well you knew my grand-mother. Mother has told meand I'm so glad. She told me to say to you that shewants you to tell me." Just a shade, at this, might over the old man's face, haveappeared to drop, but who was there to detect whether the girl observed it? It didn'tprevent, at any rate, her completing her statement. "That's why, today, she wishedme to come alone. She wished you to have me, she said, all to yourself." (James,1984, p. 98)

We would miss something vital about narrative in general, and this particularnarrative specifically, if we were to describe the "workings" of this episodesimply in terms of its cohesion or how it subscribes to our expectations for theway that stories unfoldeither in terms of sequentiality or suspense. What wewould miss is the fact that James has given us many different lines of text, orvoices, which interwoven, lend the narrative its texture and dimensionality,never mind its essential ambiguity. While much of the telling is carried outthrough the direct speech of characters, other information we have as indirect orreported speech ("She wished you to have me, she said, all to yourself.").These quotations are complemented by what occurs in the narrative voice(". . . she went on before he had spoken.") where James reports what might beobserved by any onlooker. Then, from a stance somewhere at the rim of thefiction, James speaks, not as transparent narrator, but as author, proffering a lineof commentary"but who was there to detect whether the girl observed it?".

The workings of these voices within the text are complex: First there is theinterplay of several basic stances or attitudes. We can follow this interplaybecause each voice has its own linguistic signature which we hear as signalling adistinctive kind of reliability and insight. The involved or empathetic presenta-tion of character through dialogue is marked, not just by quotation marks, but bythe present tense, the I's and you's of conversation, and by the presence ofpredicates such as "know" and "am glad" with which characters make theirinner lives and visions public. By contrast, the narrator's voice, speaking fromoutside the action, is marked by its own characteristic pattern of past tense, thirdperson, and predicates denoting observed actions ("she went on before he hadspoken"). We are alert to the voice of the author challenging us as readers whenJames crosscuts the recognizable narrator's voice with his own peculiar set ofmodals and direct questions ("Just a shade at this, might over the old man's face,have appeared to drop, but who was there to detect whether the girl observed

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THE VOICES WITHIN NARRATIVES 331

it?"). Thus, through recognizable patterns of linguistic cues, and kinds of infor-mation, James reveals the world, or the event, as seen, at that moment, byseveral intelligences. James' text is not just a single story unfolding. It is whatGeertz might call "the interplay of a disorderly crowd of not wholly commen-surable visions" (1983, p. 161). The voices are far from iterative. Each is offsetsome from the other, creating a complex murmur of possibilities.

Second, there is the plurifunctionality of each voice. Each one can be used toportray speech, to describe events, to offer commentarywith subtle, but tellingresults, for instance, when Nanda says "She told me to say to you that she wantsyou to tell me." James makes dialogue do the usual work of narrationrecallingpast events. But, by delivering her mother's words through Nanda's (rather thanthe original speaker's or a narrator's) mouth, James shows usimplicitly, butpowerfully, how ingenuously the young woman sees what others behold as hermother's clever social manipulations. Thus, through the variety of voices andtheir functions, James creates a story that is more than a monolithic telling, it is anetwork of texts within texts.

But is James an unfair or extraordinary example? Possibly this kind of jug-gling and weaving together of voices is the result of what is often argued to be thecomplexity made possible by writing and a literate tradition (Olson, 1979; Tan-nen, 1982) or James' particular absorption in and skill at portraying psychologi-cal complexity. However, the following excerpt, taken from the spontaneousplay of a 3-year-old suggests that even oral and relatively simple narratives arepotentially, or even typically, multivoiced:

Heather (3 years, 5 months)narrative dialogue stage-managing

(H. plays with a king, queen, and a princess doll, walking each along a table.)once upon a timethe baby and the mommy and the daddythey walked through the forest to find a houseand said

there's a porch

(H. puts the king in the porch, but has trouble fitting the queen in) and then thebaby said

there's not room enough

(H. looks to the adult)there's not enoughroom in this house/can you make the porchbigger/people won't fitin the porch

(The adult enlarges the porch with blocks. "Tell me some more of the story.")

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then they found a porch!(H. places the figures in the porch one by one.)She found a porchand then he found a porch(high voice) and then theywalked through the forest

(H. walks the figures around, then holds up the baby)hey, where's my mommy and daddy?

and then the mommy goes

hihi, mommyI want to go for a walk

says the baby

(H. makes sound effects as she walks the baby figure. She looks to the adult.)that's their house/and that's theirporch

At 3 years, 5 months, Heather may not have the subtlety or plurifunctionalityof James; nevertheless, she juggles at least three distinct voices in her playnarrative. She uses a narrative voice to relate the main-line events (Polanyi,1986). Using character dialogue, she conveys what characters say aloud. Step-ping outside the story world, Heather engages in stage-managing whenever shewants to negotiate about the literal conduct of her narrative with her audience.Each of these voices is marked by its own distinctive constellation of linguisticfeatures, carries certain kinds of information, and suggests a particular stance onthe unfolding events. For instance, Heather signals her use of the narrative voicewith the past tense, the third person, a predominance of declaratives, and con-nectives. In these narrative utterances, she depicts the main events of the nar-rative, as if an onlooker or spectator. She is equally clear in signalling hermovement to dialogue or stage-managing and back to narrative.

Both Heather and Henry James tell narratives across several different voices,yet neither story is incoherent. This suggests that the achievement of unified orcohesive texts may be more complicated than is sometimes suggested by textgrammars (de Beaugrand & Dressier, 1980; Halliday & Hasan, 1976) or bydescriptions of the schemes that underlie different types of texts such as stories(Kintsch & Greene, 1978; Mandler & Johnson, 1978; Peterson & McCabe,1983; Stein & Glenn, 1979) or reports (Eisenberg, 1985; Langer, 1986). Whatthe research on cohesion acknowledges is the way new information echoes oramplifies earlier occurring portions of the text. The work on underlying schemasemphasizes how the different portions of a text make sense of fulfilling ourexpectations for orientations, high points, or denouements. But in both cases, the

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accent falls on how a speaker binds textual elements into a whole. But even theshort samples from Heather or The Awkward Age point out that a text can be ajuggling act in which the teller or writer orchestrates a choir of voices, whichonly as an ensemble convey the texture of information and the author's fluctuat-ing stance towards the information being shared. What we need, as a comple-ment to models for coherence or schema, is something much closer to whatLabov (1972b), Polanyi (1986), Reisman (1987), and Schegloff (1971) describe:a portrait of a speaker who builds a coherent narrative by interweaving manyfunctions and attitudes as they are carried by a number of voices. This is what weterm intertextuality, what writers like Kundera (1987) call "polyphony" ortheorists like Bakhtin (1981; Todorov, 1981) call "dialoguism."

Heather carries this point still further. Her play narrative insists that thecapacity for intertextuality is not unique to adulthood, writing, or literature. Herjuggling of narrative, dialogue, and stage-managing suggests that the under-standing of texts as multivoiced emerges early enough to be considered a funda-mental aspect of what young speakers learn about discourse. Together the novel-ist and the child question our conception of text as linear or simply sequential.They hint that, even in streamlining our experience into texts, we preserve aselemental the social aspect of language, both the interplay of inner perspectivesand overheard voices.

In what follows, we will examine young children's play narratives in order tofind out what stories told by 2- to 7-year-olds can teach us about the nature andthe development of the capacity for intertextuality. We will look chiefly at twoquestions. First, we ask a developmental question: How do young speakers froma particular language communitymiddle-class, literate familieslearn tomark and juggle several kinds of text, or voices, within a single performance? Todo this, we take a longitudinal look at the ways in which children distinguish anduse several voices in play narratives performed between the ages of 2 and 6.Second, we ask what appears to be universal and what seems to be variable in theway that young speakers from different language communities select, mark, anduse different voices within their narrative texts. Here we compare play narrativesof two 7-year-old girls. The first child comes from a white middle-class familywhere even spoken narratives are modeled on what are often called literate,autonomous, or written texts (Olson, 1979; Tannen, 1982). The second childcomes from a black working-class family where spoken narratives typicallymake rich use of the options of oral performance: intonation, stress, dramatic useof different patterns of character speech, gesture, and facial expression (Gee,1989; Heath, 1983; Michaels, 1981).

BACKGROUND ON THE STUDIESThe narratives that figure in the remainder of the paper come from two longitudi-nal studies of children's language development. In both of these studies, wefollowed how children formatted narratives in different contexts such as oral

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tellings, dictations, recitations based on picture books, and episodes of symbolicplay with small replica-sized figures. In their replica-play narratives, childrenplayed out sequences of events using small toys as actors and turning floors orkitchen tables into theatres. They created landscapes out of available props andmade the figures run, hide, or sleep, all the while providing a running commen-tary and sound effects. These narratives, on which we will focus, are of twokinds: spontaneous play narratives in which children invent the story-line as theygo and reenactments in which children use the figures to play out events orthemes taken from a book, television, or movie. In the first study we collectedplay narratives from nine middle-class, Caucasian, English-speaking childrenfrom families who encouraged their children to "speak text" from early on(Wolf & Pusch, 1985). We followed these children longitudinally, visiting themin their homes weekly between the ages of 1 and 3, bimonthly between the agesof 3 and 7 (Shotwell, Wolf, & Gardner, 1980; Wolf & Grollman, 1982). In asecond study, we followed a group of 50 children from their kindergartenthrough second grade years, looking at the transition to literacy (Wolf et al.,1988). The children in this study included working-class white, Hispanic, andblack children, along with children similar to those in the first study. All thesechildren were seen individually, but in the context of school.

In all cases, children's narratives were audio-recorded, with extensive fieldnotes being made by an observer. These notes included information about gaze,the figures or props being used, the actions performed with those props, and theway in which the child used his or her face and voice along with speech.

CODING THE DATA

The data from the replica play sessions was coded in three ways: for clause units,voices, and the linguistic features characterizing the clauses occurring withineach voice. Drawing on Berman and Slobin (1984), we defined a clause as anyunit containing a predicate. Clause units may be syntactically independent, orthey may be subordinate or relative clause constructions. Thus, each of thefollowing examples represents a single clause unit:

he went to the cavehe sees the Mommy Bear'cause she was sad

In the replica play narratives which constitute our sample, subordinate and rela-tive clause constructions are quite rare. This is perhaps due to the nature of thetask: Particularly, young children tend to tell their replica play narratives in akind of to-the-point, "sportscasting" diction which allows them to provide on-line descriptions of characters' actions as they are performed. Thus, they are lesslikely to recall events or to present information in subordinate constructions.

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Nevertheless, the segmentation of narrative clause into units based upon verbphrase constructions is justified on theoretical grounds. Namely, such segmenta-tion enables us to examine whether children adopt and sustain characteristicpatterns of linguistic features, including the temporal system, to mark functionaldistinctions between voices.

Once children's narratives were broken into clauses, each of these units wascoded for the voice in which it occurred. We defined voice as a stance taken bythe speaker relative to the unfolding narrative events. On the basis of earliercross-sectional studies (Wolf, Goldfield, & Beeghly, 1984), we assigned indi-vidual clauses to one of three of the most prominent voices we discerned inchildren's play narratives: stage-managing, character dialogue, or narrative. Wemade these assignments on the basis of pragmatic information and the child's useof pronounsboth of which signal the perspective the child is taking on theevents in the story world.

When children focused their attention away from the table or play area (thescene of the story), fixing it instead on the experimenter or objects in theirsurroundings, and marked their utterances with the "I-you" forms characteristicof joint conversation, we coded these clauses as occurring in the stage-managingvoice. In these cases, we saw children as taking up the stance of a collaboratorinvolved in joint negotiations about the actual performance or interpretation ofnarrative events or the nature and use of the props.

We considered children's utterances as dialogue when children focused theirattention on play figures and simultaneously provided speech encoded primarilyin the first person and pronominal forms characteristic of direct speech by aparticipant in an ongoing event. These utterances were also often speciallymarked with distinctive pitches and dynamics. Finally, utterances were scored asnarrative when children focused their attention on characters, using the thirdperson and depicting story events as an observer. While this voice was typicallyperformed at normal pitch levels, it sometimes carried the deliberate rhythms ofstory-telling or a heightened sing-song tone.

Thus, the segmentation of clauses into stage-managing, narrative, or dialoguestrands was the result of both linguistic distinctions (prosodic and pronominal) aswell as visual cues available to the experimenter and transcriber. In this way,utterances which would be otherwise ambiguous could be distinguished. Anutterance, for example, such as: "this is the daddy bear" was scored as anarrative clause if the child's attention was focused upon the toy bear. If, on theother hand, the child raised up the toy bear for the experimenter to see andannounced, "this is the daddy bear," the clause was scored as stage-managing.

The linguistic features we examined consisted of the different linguistic sub-systems which speakers and writers have available to them to distinguish amongthe voices occurring within their texts. This type of coding builds on recentresearch in child language and discourse analysis which has shown that func-tionally distinct types of narrative are often distinguished through the use of

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particular constellations of linguistic features rather than the exclusive use ofindividual features. Thus, when telling highly-scripted narratives, children typ-ically mark their accounts by use of the present tense, second person pro-nominals, and sequencing connectives used in a generalized sense (Nelson,1986). By contrast, when engaged in story-telling, children typically markedtheir utterances with patterns of first or third person pronouns, predominant useof the past tense, and more specific sequential connectives (Applebee, 1978;Eisenberg, 1985; Peterson & McCabe, 1983). When children provide runningcommentary on ongoing events they may also make use of first or third personpronominals and sequential connectives, but in those "on-line replays" childrencombine these features with distinctive patterns of temporal features, such as thepredominant use of the English progressive form (Gee, 1986).

Based on this work, we coded each clause within a child's play narrative forthe total set of linguistic features shown in Table 1 below.

The first set of features is the use of various types of pronominal forms. Thesepatterns of .pronominal use were used in conjunction with pragmatic informationto assign clauses to particular voices. Strands which are recounted in the stage-managing voice or in a dialogue voice for the most part contain first and secondperson pronominals, since the characters are involved in face-to-face interac-tions. Strands which are recounted in the narrative voice, however, generally

TABLE 1Coding Features for Replica Play Narratives

A. Referential System1) first person pronominals (I, we)2) second person pronominals (you)3) third person pronominals (she, he, it, they, someone, everyone)4) nominals (the baby bear, Hippo, the pond)

B. Utterance Form1) declarative (he went to the forest)2) imperative (come to my cave)3) interrogative (where are you going?)

C. Temporal System1) verb inflections

present (-s) and past (-d, -ed) tenseEnglish progressive (-ing)

2) verb semantic typephysical state (have, be, seem)internal state (think, feel, wonder)process (play, swim, learn)event (take, get, scare)

3) connectivessequencers (and, and-then)temporal connectives (after, before, while)causal connectives (because)

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contain third person pronominals since events are narrated from the outsideperspective of the narrator. Since these pronominal features were used to codethe voice of each clause, what is at issue is the way in which children usepronouns in conjunction with additional kinds of linguistic features to mark theirmovement between several types of text within the same play narrative.

The second set of linguistic features we examined was children's differentialuse of various types of utterance forms. One can predict a priori that utterances inthe narrative voice will be predominantly declarative in nature and that dialogueutterances will contain more of a mix of utterance types. Dialogue and stage-managing utterances reflect more of an interactive stance, so that questions andcommands may be used as well as declarative utterances. As was the case withthe pronominal system, we pursued an examination of the differential use ofutterance forms as a part of asking how various linguistic subsystems are used inconjunction with one another.

The third and final set of linguistic features we coded included children's useof the temporal system to encode various facets of the narrative timeline. Welooked at their use of verb inflections, verb semantic types (aktionsart), andsequential connectives across each of the voices in order to capture the possibledifferential use of these temporal forms within one narrative text. The use of verbinflections, such as past versus present tense, is a self-evident temporal dimen-sion, involving simply differential use of one or the other verb inflection. Theuse of the English progressive form is an aspectual distinction entailing durationor the ongoing status of events. An examination of the differential use of verbsemantic types within separate voices is based upon the distinction noted inParsons (1986) and also Vendler (1967) between verbs which encode events andthose which encode states and processes. Event verbs (take, get, come) entailactions having a punctual endpoint or terminus, whereas process verbs (play,swim, run) entail activities with no specific endpoint. Physical state (be, have,seem) and internal state (like, feel, want) verbs entail actions which, by defini-tion, extend over an interval of time. Differential use of verb semantic types mayreflect functional distinctions in the types of events encoded in each voice.Within the narrative voice, for example, one might expect to find a large propor-tion of event verbs since narrative mainline clauses are most typically punctate innature (Labov, 1972b; Polanyi, 1986). In dialogue one might expect to find agreater proportion of verbs representing the internal states (thoughts, feelings,wishes) of characters.

Finally, an examination of the use of sequential connectives (and, and then) isintended to capture children's awareness of the temporal ordering of narrativeevents. If children are indeed sensitive to the functional distinction betweenvoices in replica play narrative, one should find a disproportionate use of suchconnectors in the various strands. Narrative strands are normally temporallysequenced, so that their order in time is nonreversible (Labov, 1972b). Dialogueand stage-managing utterances, however, need not be temporally sequenced

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since what is being encoded is often the characters' thoughts and feelings. Thus,an examination of the use of sequential connectors within each discourse strandmight also provide some information about children's skill in differentiatingvoices.

HOW EARLY INTERTEXTUALITY EMERGES: A LINGUISTICANALYSIS OF THE LONGITUDINAL DATA

Heather is no aberration. In all of our longitudinal subjects, the capacity forintertextuality appears as early as the third year and continues to develop rapidly.By age 3 all the children consistently mark their movement between three voices,or types of narrative text: narrative, character dialogue, and stage-managing,using features such as performance qualities, pronouns, and utterance types.Between 3 and 5, children add temporal features to the constellations of lin-guistic characteristics they use to signal their use of a particular voice. Beginningat 5, children's use of the separate voices becomes substantially more subtle asthey exploit the plurifunctionality of the several voices, for example, reportingspeech as a narrator or recounting events via character speech.

The Appearance of Voices Within the TextAs early as children can produce the relevant linguistic features, their playnarratives contain both dialogue and narrative voices. Our data also suggests thatchildren at this very early age can produce stage-managing strands. The replicaplay narrative from Heather below illustrates:

Heather (2 years, 11 months)

narrative dialogue stage-managing

and (actions)(Heather manipulates toy animals and people who go into a house, only to find alion inside)a person will go in the houseand the lion will comeand eat the person

(Heather walks a toy lion along)here's the lion comingthe lion ate Pierre [a toy human figure] up(Heather has a toy girl run to a giraffe)

run, run, run!

the giraffe's scared of the lion

(as giraffe)go back in the houseand go to sleep

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(experimenter toHeather: the girl's goingback to her house?)yeah! and we'regonna get anotherperson scared

(Heather finds another human figure)two people are gonna go in the houseand the lion's gonna comeand get them

Even before she is 3, Heather distinguishes separate voices in her replicanarrative on the basis of pragmatic as well as linguistic features within eachvoice. Stage-managing utterances are distinctive in that they are a forum forinteractions with the experimenter about characters in the story. In this sense,these utterances represent an excursion from the story world itself, not unlike theasides or departures that adult speakers index with changes of tone, "push-popmarkers," or shifts in topic (Polanyi, 1986; Schriffrin, 1982). Such utterancesare nevertheless to be distinguished from wholly external comments in that theyare directly concerned with the events taking place in the narrative. In the shortexcerpt shown above, stage-managing utterances are also linguistically dis-tinguished from narrative and dialogue utterances by the use of the second personproform (we're).

Heather differentiates narrative and dialogue strands in her story on the basisof a still different constellation of features. Segments recounted in the narrativevoice contain full nominal forms (the lion, a person) along with third personpronominal forms (them). In addition, narrative clauses are cast in declarativesentence forms. In this particular example (although this varies from child tochild), dialogue segments consist solely of imperatives containing no overt pro-nominal forms. The predominant tense in narrative strands is the present, usedfrequently with gonna constructions as Heather engages in a kind of predictivestyle of narration (and the lion's gonna come and get them). Dialogue utterances,being imperative in nature, are not marked for tense, although one could hypoth-esize that any nonimperative utterances would also be marked with present tense.

In this way, Heather already performs stories in which she moves fluentlybetween narrative, dialogue, and stage-managing, marking each strand using adistinct constellation of types of pronominal forms and sentence types. In somerespects, one also sees a nascent distinction between strands with regards to thetypes of temporal linguistic forms used. Note, for example, the frequent use ofand as a type of sequencer in Heather's narrative strands. In general, however,narrative and dialogue strands are not distinguishable in Heather's narrative interms of either the types of verbs used to encode events (most of the verbs usedare event verbs), the predominant tense (the present), or the use of sequentialconnectives (and is found in both narrative and dialogue strands).

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The excerpt from Heather's narrative illuminates two separate, though relat-ed, linguistic skills available to 3-year-old children. First, even children thisyoung have the ability to represent and to encode separate voices: Even after shehas exited from the story world to plan what is coming up, when she resumes heruse of the narrative voice, it is with the same constellation of characteristics sheused earlier. Second, Heather's narrative points out that the manipulation ofseparate voices in narrative also involves the ability to move back and forthwithout disrupting the overall task of making a coherent narrative. The theme ofcharacters being scared by a lion is maintained and the narrative events advancewithout disruption, even though she moves back and forth across three voices.The fact that Heather makes cohesive ties across voices is equally important.When, in a stage-managing clause, she says "and we're gonna get anotherperson is scared," "another" may refer back not only to the preceding commentby the experimenter, but to her own earlier mention of people whom the lionfrightens. This means that young children represent to themselves the demandsfor separate voices, and then utilize linguistic skills in creating distinct voices atthe same time that they understand themselves to be telling an integratednarrative.

The Temporal Marking of VoicesAn examination of data from subjects between the ages of 3 and 6 suggests thatdevelopmental changes in the marking of separate voices occur mainly in chil-dren's use of the temporal system. The excerpts below further suggest that by age5 the differential use of temporal forms within voices is well in hand. The replicaplay narrative from Jeannie at age 4 illustrates:

Jeannie (4 years, 1 month)

narrative dialogue stage-managingand actions(Jeannie is playing with large and small elephants as well as some other animalreplicas. She pushes over a small elephant.)

this is going to beher baby

and her baby followed him(experimenter: and the big elephant said:

"oh, how beautiful I am!")(in high voice) me too, Mommy(as hippo) he sure is ugly

(experimenter: the elephant was very sad)and the baby too

(as baby) let's go to another jungle(Jeannie walks elephant off to the "city")

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they cameand heard himand they were his friends(she turns the figures to face elephant)they gave them foodand gave them a barn

Jeannie's narrative points out several changes with respect to the use of thetemporal features (semantic verb types, verb inflections, and sequential connec-tives) used to mark the different voices within a text. She recounts narrativestrands entirely in the past, whereas she casts dialogue (as well as stage manag-ing strands) in the present. In addition, narrative strands contain a large numberof sequencers (and), but dialogue strands consist of interchanges between char-acters which are not explicitly marked for their temporal sequence. Finally, whenshe narrates segments one finds a large number of event type verbs {gave,followed, came) representing actions having a set terminus. In contrast, when shespeaks for characters one finds the use of state verbs (is-ugly, is-beautiful) inaddition to event verbs (go). Thus, in her narrative at age 4, Jeannie uses abroader constellation of features to distinguish among voices. Not only does shemake use of pronominal and nominal forms and sentence types but she also usesfeatures of the temporal system to signal whether events are being portrayed fromthe perspective of a spectator or a participant.

In addition to the changes exemplified in Jeannie's narrative, both dialogueand narrative segments become more lengthy between ages 3 and 5, so thatcharacters may have exchanges extending over several turns and the narrator mayengage in lengthy discussions about events. The excerpt below from Jonathan'snarrative at age 5 illustrates;

Jonathan (4 years, 11 months)

narrative dialogue

(Jonathan is constructing a story centered on a "strange creature" living in a "funnyland")(Jonathan holds a boy figure)and then he would go outand restand then he found a snakebut he picked it up

it's really a snakehe saidthen he went over to his sisterbut she was scaredso she ran away

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342 WOLF AND HICKS

and she got lostthis was the land of funny menand then the guy [the strange creature] cameand he said

what's the matter?

(girl figure) I got lostwell, what's this land called?

(strange creature) funny landwhat do you think it's called?

(girl) well, where were you?(strange creature) in that tree(girl) what tree? over there?(strange creature) yeah(girl) bring me over

so he didhe [the strange creature] was madthis one (Jonathan points to the strange creature)because he liked that little girland he decided to take her away to funny land

In the context of these longer segments, children recast information acrossvoices. For example, in the excerpt shown above, Jonathan, in his voice asnarrator, announces that the boy character in the story found a snake ("and thenhe found a snake"). Then, this same information is recast in the form of thereplica character announcing, "it's really a snake." Additionally, one finds atthe end of the series of interchanges between characters an imperative from thegirl character in the story ("bring me over"). This same information is thenrecast in the narrative voice as Jonathan narrates, "so he did." These recastingsprefigure what children achieve between 5 and 6, as they work out the ways inwhich any particular voice can be made to serve a variety of narrative functions.

Differentiations within Voices: The Development ofPlurifunctionalityBetween ages 5 and 6, children elaborate their understanding that any voice cancarry any type of information in a new direction. Each of the several voices theyuse comes to exhibit increasing and more diversified plurifunctionality. By thetime they are 5, children begin to have characters speak about eventsrecollect-ing, forecasting, and sportscasting ongoing actions. In a complementary waythey use the narrative voice to present speech indirectly, offering as a matter ofobservation that "the bear told him . . . " or "the pirate shouted that . . . " . Theexcerpt below from Heather's narrative shown below illustrates:

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Heather 4 years, 7 months

(Heather is creating a story surrounding a giant living in a strange forest with"regular" animals)dialogue stage-managing

(Heather holds a replica giraffe)oh, I'll eat some grassyum, yumlet me eat some leaves from the earthquake last nightdid you knowthat there was an earthquake last night?

(duck) oh, no(giraffe) eat some leaves of this tree standing up(as forest animals) what have you done?(as giant) took your bathand I made a pond for you

this is really Santa Claus

(as giant) I gave you a nice present to the little animalsthey lived in the forest once long agothey came this year

Both the brief recall at the beginning of the segment and the longer narrativerecounted by the giant in the last dialogue segment represent the plurifunc-tionality of a particular voice within the larger discourse. Here, Heather demon-strates that she has skill not only in manipulating separate voices but also inembedding a variety of discourse functions within separate voices. She hasbroken out of a strict one-to-one match between voices and functions. She canpresent speech as dialogue, she can report it as an event, she can duck out intostage-managing and try out, edit, and reperform a bit. She has, if not all, many ofJames' options.

SUMMARY OF THE LINGUISTIC ANALYSISThis look at children's differential use of constellations of linguistic featuresshows that already in their third year, children tell narratives that are anything butsimply sequential. Already their stories are multivocal, involving the weavingtogether of at least three distinct voices: stage-managing, character dialogue, andnarrative. By age 3, separate voices are distinguished in children's replica playnarratives on the basis of use of pronominals and of sentence types. Betweenages 3 and 5, children use their emerging understanding of the temporal nature of

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344 WOLF AND HICKS

different types of narratives and their increasing control of the temporal systemsof their language to mark distinctions between the several voices in their playnarratives still more emphatically. Between 5 and 6, children showed an increasein the plurifunctionality of voices. By age 5, the children in the study showed anincreasing tendency to embed multiple functions within voices, so that narrativesegments could be recounted by story characters and character speech could berecounted from the perspective of the narrator. Thus, although the children in thelatter 2 years of the study generally marked voices with consistent use of lin-guistic forms, they also demonstrated an increasing amount of skill in the manip-ulation of these linguistic forms.

One way of thinking about the early and elegant emergence of several voicesand multiple functions within children's narratives is to suggest that the linguisticdistinctions "piggyback" on a fundamental understanding of the differentstances or perspectives that a person can takeor find themselves inwithrespect to events. The role or voice of a narrator with its more distant stance withrespect to events, may encode the experience of looking-on, or observing, whatBritton (1982) terms a spectator stance. When children engage in characterdialogue, however, their perspective on events is much more intimate in nature,so that this voice may be representative of what Britton terms a participantstance, a stance which may encode what it is like to be in the midst of an event.The role and voice of the stage-manager is a kind of executive stance, it comesfrom the position of someone who must shepherd events towards their end,without wanting to observe and without being in the midst of what is going on.Perhaps it has its earliest roots in the nurturing, nudging voices of mothers andfathers. The increase in the latter 2 years of the study of the plurifunctionalitywithin voices may reflect recognition that more than words convey the meaningof stories: The vantage point from which we offer information hints broadly athow much involvement, empathy, and intimacy is entailed.

SOCIOCULTURAL DIFFERENCES IN THE MARKING OFVOICE DISTINCTIONS

The previous discussions were based upon data from middle-class children, alargely homogeneous population in terms of home language socialization (Snow,1983). In our discussions of the developmental data, we have seen changesbetween ages 3 and 6 in how voice distinctions are marked. Yet, the ability tomark separate voices in play narrative is not a linguistic given but forms part ofchildren's larger socialization into language skills. We know that adult speakersfrom different sociocultural backgrounds utilize different linguistic means toencode narrative events (Gumperz, Kaltman, & O'Connor, 1983; Labov,1972b), and that children also adopt different narrative styles as part of theirprimary language socialization. Indeed, sociolinguistic analyses of children's

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narratives has shown that children of different cultural backgrounds have quitedistinctive ways of talking about events (Gee, 1985; Heath, 1983; Michaels &Collins, 1984).

The immediate question then becomes "How is the way in which childrenmark and use voices sensitive to the differing notions of narrative prevalentamong speakers and writers in different language communities?" The narrativesof two 7-year-old girls from different language backgrounds provide at least aninitial answer. In looking at these narratives, we shall see that while both girlsmark the differences in separate voices using similar constellations of linguisticfeatures, the overall pattern of voices within their narratives is markedlydifferent.

Malka, the first of our two subjects, comes from a home environment which isupper middle-class and in which a great deal of emphasis is placed upon literacy-related activities. Malka attends a private school where children are exposed tolong, sophisticated written texts and expected to be active "inventors" when itcomes to spelling and writing. In her classroom, Malka is considered a "writ-er." In fact, she spent many free afternoons drafting a "novel". Rene comesfrom a working-class home and attends a public elementary school where literacyskills are taught chiefly by rote and where correct code use is valued much morethan inventiveness. In addition, Rene is black, and her narratives even at age 7contain some of the characteristically rich storytelling style of speakers of BlackEnglish (Gee, 1985; Heath, 1985; Labov, 1972b): rich use of prosodic devices,active gestures and facial expressions, open expression of emotions and evalua-tions. Rene is considered a "talker" in her classroom. She knows countlessjump rope rhymes and lyrics to radio songs. She can be a fierce tease. When shewinds up to tell the full story of Martin Luther King, it includes everythingright down to her grandmother's opinions.

Rene and Malka's stories are drawn from a larger corpus of narratives ob-tained from 54 children. Each of the 54 subjects was shown a short silent filmabout children playing with a magic yellow hat and was asked to perform threetasks. Children were first asked to narrate the film's events as a story without theuse of toy figures, pictures, or other props. They were then asked to narrate thefilm's events using small replica figures representing characters (along with theyellow hat) in the film. Finally, children were asked, according to their abilities,to either write or dictate the story in the film. The replica play task constitutes auseful base for comparison with our earlier sample of eight children. It is,furthermore, of particular interest for our purposes here since this task was basedupon the same stimulus, a short silent film, modeled on Chafe's "Pear Film"(Chafe, 1980).

When Malka narrates the replica play task she renders the events in a carefullysequenced form that is perhaps closer to an account than to a story. She immedi-ately assumes the outside voice (perspective) of the narrator and maintains this

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346 WOLF AND HICKS

particular stance throughout. She is quite exact about what she says, rarely goingbeyond the clearly observable events of the film. Her narrative is reproduced inpart below:

Malka (age 7)

narrative dialogue

one day two boyswere hiding in thepark with a hat

let's surprise the boywho always walks through

one whispered to the otherthis boy walked into the parkhe looked aroundand then one of the boys threw the hat inhe picked it upand put it onthen he started twirling aroundone of the boys ran outand grabbed the hatpulling it back inthe boy dove into the bushes after his hathe's probably got a headache afterwards'cuz he dove in headfirstfinally he came output his coat over his headand put on his mittensand then walked behind a big bushto hidetwo boys looked for himbut they couldn't see himsince he was hiding

(the two boys speaking)let's go look for him

they took the hat . . .they walked alongfinally/the/the other kid who had hid behind the bushesjumped outthey walked off together with their coats upand one of the kids wearing the hat . . . .

It is obvious from a global examination of Malka's narrative that events arerecounted almost wholly from the narrator voice, with the dialogue voice playing

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only a minor role. Aside from the dominance of narrative strands, the narrativevoice is quite sharply marked with the distinctive use of sequencers like and thenand finally, and also uses connectives which indicate precise temporal bound-aries and causal relatedness (until, since). In addition, both of the dialogueutterances in this particular example serve only as a forecast of events to occur inthe narrative but do not provide the kind of psychological or evaluative informa-tion which typically supplements or enhances the depiction of an event chain(Labov, 1972b). Finally, it is the narrative strand that Malka has differentiated:In the narrative voice she both depicts events ("the boy dove into the bushesafter his hat") and comments on them ("he's probably got a headache after-wards"). In sum, it seems that Malka takes the stance of a spectator as shenarrates the events from the film.

In her replica play version of the yellow hat film, Rene assumes a dramat-ically different approach to encoding the film's events, treating it, not as a report,but as a highly evaluated story, perhaps even bordering on a dramatic representa-tion of the film events. In Rene's story, the dialogue voice is given higher status,and many events important to her story's development are recounted from theperspective of one or the other character. In her rendition, it is dialogue ratherthan narrative which is internally differentiated. She creates two quite distinctiveroles in the finder and his friend, whose two-part interactions move the story,rather than merely echo what the narrator has already laid out. As a result, herreplica play narrative as a whole is representative of a more participatory stancetowards events:

Rene (age 7)narrative dialogueso those two guys in the bushesI mean/the housethey are eating/um/some pie/grape pieand the other/there's a boycomes

and throws a yellow hatand hides behind the bushesand then the oth . . . /the boy goes/saw itand picked it upand put it onand said

look what I found over there!and his friend said

that's a nice bright yellow hatand then

are you gonna keep it?

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348 WOLF AND HICKS

and he saidyeahbut I'm gonna comb my hair a little

and so/his friend put it right downthen/the other one started eatingthe other one was combing his hairthen they took the hat awayand the friend said

where's my hat?where's my hat?it was right over there!

and then the other guy saiddo you/are you hiding it from me?

the other guy saidno I'm not

and the guy saidI believe you

then they started looking for it in the bushes . . .

The proportional use of dialogue segments is higher in Rene's replica playnarrative than in Malka's, but even more interesting is the way in which dialoguestrands are used. Recall that in Malka's story, dialogue strands played a second-ary role in the overall structure of the narrative. In Rene's story, however,dialogue carries important information which is conveyed from the perspectiveof the characters involved in the actions. The projection of information fromcharacters' perspectives means that one obtains additional information about howcharacters feel about certain events (that's a nice bright yellow hat). It also meansthat certain events in the story take on a quality of greater importance andexcitement, as characters express their reactions to happenings. Compare, forexample, Rene's rendition of one of the key events in the storythe point atwhich the yellow hat is stolen from the principal characterto Malka's renditionof the same events. From her perspective as an outside spectator, Malka gives astraightforward account of what happened (one of the boys ran out and grabbedthe hat, pulling it back in). In contrast, through her use of the dialogue voiceRene takes a radically different approach to the same event (and the friend said,"Where's my hat? Where's my hat? It was right over there!"). Seen through theeyes of the characters, these key events are recounted in all their gravity andexcitement. Thus, Rene in her replica narrative assumes much more of aparticipant stance in terms of her extensive use of dialogue strands.

These differences, however, take place against a background of shared capac-ities: Both Malka and Rene distinguish among voices by employing largely

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similar constellations of features. Both girls mark narrative clauses through theuse of third person, declaratives, past tense, a preponderance of event verbs, andsequential connectives. They signal the onset of dialogue segments with first andsecond person pronouns, the presence of questions and imperatives, presenttense, a higher proportion of state verbs, and the absence of sequential connec-tives. The way in which the two voices are usedthat is, their function in thediscourseis, however, quite different. Malka assumes greater distance fromevents occurring in her replica play, narrating actions in the voice of a narrator.As a result, the emphasis in her narrative is on the sequential and causal linksbetween eventsin short, the when and why of what happened. Rene takes asomewhat different stance, narrating events in part from the perspective of anarrator but in part from the perspective of the characters involved in the action.Some of the important events in the story are recounted through the eyes of thecharacters involved and thus take on a more emotional quality. In this way, thedescriptive analyses of the two narratives above provide some evidence thatintertextuality in children's play narratives is like many other aspects of narrativecompetence, highly sensitive to sociocultural variation in terms of how separatevoices are used to encode events. Although both girls understand the power andthe importance of portraying the "murmur of many voices" within their nar-ratives, they choose different leading voices. Malka speaks as an observer poisedat the rim of events. Rene speaks chiefly in the voices of participants, from themiddle of the narrative.

CONCLUSIONS

Heather, Jonathan, Malka, and Rene should revise our notions of what it is to tella story. Certainly, that work involves getting the sequence of events down,subscribing to some notion of high point or goal, and remembering to mind themoment-to-moment ties and references which will make the performance awhole rather than a collection of spoken bits. But this kind of portrait is tooshallow, too simple. Milan Kundera, the Czech novelist, is probably right:Stories are much more like pieces of music than we admit. The best ones areanything but single tunes.

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the voices within narratives

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