DEICTIC REFERENCES IN SIMPLIFIED ...

JoLIE 4/2011

DEICTIC REFERENCES IN SIMPLIFIED ILLUSTRATED VERSIONS OF THE ADVENTURES OF PINOCCHIO (PORT. - ENG.) Alcina Sousa University of Madeira, Portugal

Abstract This paper aims at analysing the way writers/translators and illustrators in simplified versions, in Portuguese and English, of Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio, skilfully resort both to linguistic / stylistic choices and to non-verbal language to disambiguate deictic references (namely ‘here’ / ‘there’, ‘now’, ‘this’ / ‘that’), otherwise beyond young readers’ grasp. A multi-layered interpretive framework, drawing on discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, and a corpus-based approach (Carter 1994:5), contributes to an understanding of the dynamic intersemiotic dialogue in multimodal simplified stories. These challenge the children with different but sequenced perspectives, facilitating their comprehension of space and time references, thereby fostering visual literacy, language acquisition and reading literacy in the process of meaning-making. Key words: Deixis; Simplified children’s stories; Multimodal texts; Encoding strategies; Intersemiotic dialogue.

1 Introduction The cohesive ties devised across phrases and sentences (Richardson 1998:124) “linking utterances to the contexts in which they are produced” deserve careful study within pragmatics, a discourse-based view and stylistics approach. Also, in their collection of papers “sketching major theoretical and methodological directions for future research on spatial entities”, Aurnague, Hickman and Vieu (2007) have documented that their properties, “their implications for spatial cognition and its development in children”1 need further analysis within a crosslinguistic and interdisciplinary approach, beyond the realm of psycholinguistic studies. Considering the corpus of under scrutiny, Richardson’s perspective on 1

Among the issues under scope and discussed by different scholars within a crosslinguistic perspective, particularly borrowing from research on French, English and Korean subjects, stand out the study of spatial entities, like ‘contre’, ‘par’, ‘à travers’, “avant”, ‘devant’, ‘in’, ‘on’, and motion verbs, including the classifier systems across Indo-European languages by Grinevald (cited in Aurnague, Hickman & Vieu 2007).

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translating deixis (1998) seems relevant as involving core deictic dimensions, i.e. the personal, the spatial and the temporal ones, in text rewriting/translation (Op. cit.:126): “in a translation, as in most written texts, prototypical indexical items such as I, now or here, do not imply reference to a personal, temporal or spatial origo congruent with the reader’s encounter with the text; there is rather, a deictic projection made from the situation of production of the text to the reception of that text by the reader”. Hence, in (Ibidem) “a literary translation, there will often be a tendency to avoid such contextualization: the reader may be expected to make the necessary imaginative leap”. Bearing the issues raised so far in previous research (Rozendaal 2008; Tanz 2009) this paper aims at discussing writers’/illustrators’ strategies to facilitate children’s reading, interaction with and gradual perception of cohesive ties, namely pronominal references such as this, that, or time and space anchors, like now and the binaries here/there in shared reading of creative texts (also called child-parent book reading or child-caregiver book reading). These are evidenced in both adapted and simplified versions of a classic story among children’s books: Le Avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un Buratino (Collodi 1883), in its English version, Pinocchio (Ladybird Book collection, issued in 1987), and a similar version in Portuguese, Pinóquio (translated by Maria João Rodrigues), issued by Everest Editora in 2002. In so doing, the strategies devised end up promoting: visual literacy (Necyk 2007); language acquisition (Halliday 1996; Senechal & Cornell 1993); text and discourse-level grammar awareness; book literacy in children’s early reading experiences through stories and books. This study will resort to the close analysis of the aforementioned simplified versions by drawing on a multi-layered interpretive framework (Carter 1994:5), involving discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, and a corpus-based approach, so as to uncover ways in which writers/illustrators make use of linguistic structures as well as the discursive components of pictures (Carter 1994:5) “in order to address the reader / subject of the discourse and subject him / her to a particular way of seeing (and believing)”. For the attainment of this goal, this study resorts to the analysis of the context of occurrence of cohesive ties in illustrated and simplified versions of The Adventures of Pinocchio, a canonical literary text adapted and simplified, addressed at the ‘little readers’, who are nevertheless unable to fully understand their meaning potential until they reach the pre-schooling age (Piaget 1954, 1962). After offering a brief explanation of the scope of this paper, be it in the collection of qualitative data, data gathering and analysis, by drawing on different but complementary theoretical approaches (exploratory analysis and corpus linguistics analysis), this paper will turn to the presentation and illustration of the strategies related to encoding/decoding space and time references along with the dynamic intersemiotic dialogue evidenced in multimodal simplified stories to promote young readers’/listeners’ emotional and cognitive involvement towards an understanding of deictic references.

Deictic references in simplified illustrated versions of The Adventures …

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2 Corpus and methods Readers’/children’s age range should be a criterion in order to select the corpus, especially because a previous study (Sousa 2008) of the Portuguese version of Carlo Collodi’s narrative, As Aventuras de Pinóquio, História de um Boneco (translated by Margarida Periquito, with illustrations by Paula Rego 2004)2 has accounted for a wide range of deictic expressions beyond young readers’ grasp, specially at a socio-cognitive stage at which children cannot take the reader’s role unless there is an adult to monitor the reading process. Since the children’s books under analysis have illustrations, this study also includes some passages about the functions of illustration which also support the narratee’s understanding of deictic references, borrowing from recent research on the grammar of the visual text (Kress 2009; Kress & van Leeuwen 1996) and picture book research (Lewis 2001; Colomer, Kümmerling-Meibauer & Silva-Diaz 2010). The simplified and illustrated versions in this study are addressed at 4 to 6year-olds, comprising the so-called group in the pre-operational stage3, in the line of the socio-cognitive framework by Piaget (1954, 1962) and supposedly taking into account target readers’ socio-linguistic competence (Widdowson 1996:89). The selection comprises: (1) an English version - Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, issued in 1987 by Ladybird books, with 661 words, 266 unique words and 43 pages with illustrations; and a Portuguese version – Pinóquio, issued in 2002, and translated by Maria João Rodrigues with illustrations by Belén Avelar, Isabel Romero and Ruan Rosco, with 932 words, 416 unique words, and 16 pages with illustrations. By comparing the selected versions of the narrative, this study intends to: account for the occurrence of the deictic expressions in the texts; and analyse the way deictic expressions are disambiguated at the textual level so as to discuss the way translators / writers and designers monitor the reading process towards meaning-making (Goodman & Flemming 1969; Goodman 1970), by providing broader but enriching instances, so that children may disentangle textual references (Halliday & Hasan 1976, 1985) also called ‘shifters’ (Jakobson 1950), ‘embrayeurs’ (Maingueneau 1990) and ‘deixis’ (Traugott & Pratt 1980) pointing to naming, reference and agency. A close reading of the corpus led to the search of a couple of instances (Biber et al. 1998) likely to uncover recurrent strategies to disambiguate deictic items in the texts. Before focusing on spatial anchors retrieved from the corpus, within a contrastive analysis, other cohesive ties, namely nouns and determiners, are highlighted in several headings and subheadings, like reference, particularly cohesion in English and Portuguese. For a more comprehensive display and 2

The original versions were also compared to the bilingual version (Portuguese / English) by Walt Disney (translated by Teresa Carvalho and Rui Guedes; and illustrated by Belén Avelar, Isabel Romero and Ruan Rosco), issued in 1996. 3 Although the theory of mind, following modern psychology and cognitive psychology, has challenged Piaget’s concepts, the discussion of its framework is beyond the scope of this paper.

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analysis of their context of occurrence, and semantic prosody (Sinclair 1987, 1991, 2004, Louw 1993 in Sampson and McCarthy 2004), this study resorted to a concordancer4, Concapp 4, after having turned the two narrative versions into the digital format (saved as RTF). The systematic analysis of the frequency of occurrence of deictic references ‘here’ / ’there’, ‘now’, ‘this’ / ’that’, entailed the scrutiny of their context of occurrence, be it in the concordance lines (strings), at the sentence and textual levels. This allows for retrieving the context of occurrence of repeated patterns (for example, words, phrases or constructions), along with the search of co-occurring items (Partington 1998:138), as well as their quantification displayed in tables.

3 Review of the literature According to Nuttall (1982:32) adapted versions involve “removing many of the barriers to understanding offered by the original text (…) namely unfamiliar lexis” whereas simplified versions imply other strategies, such as the “use of rules which are grammatically (morphologically/phonologically, etc.) less complex”. Richards et al. also mention the rewriting strategies in graded readers (1992:335): “a text written for children learning their mother tongue, or for second or foreign language learners, in which the language content is based on a language grading scheme.” So comparing the number of words in the simplified versions, be it in Portuguese (932 words) or in English (661 words), to the original one, the latter is far larger. For instance the translation into Portuguese of Le Avventure di Pinocchio: Storia di un buratino, with 62 illustrations by Mazzanti, presents 41260 words, with six illustrations by Rego (2004). As a rewriting /translation, it should (Nuttall 1982:32) “retain the textual quality and discourse structure” of the authentic text. 3.1 Reference So as to discuss the role of reference in story comprehension, as a major aspect of discourse and stylistic analysis, Emmott (2006:441) rightly points to core issues of relevance for this paper. First “such items determine the way in which entities are described as a story, poem or play develops, including everything from the major characters to background details”, and secondly, “referring expressions are generally of most stylistic interest when they break the usual patterns in the language, since then they may be used for special effects” among which stand out, in the corpus under scrutiny, “juxtaposition of different perspectives and representation of the style of thinking of characters”. Accordingly, she further claims (cf. Brown & Yule 1983) that the study of the interpretation of referring

4 Software: ConcApp Concordance and Word Profiler Version 4 for Windows operating systems (98, ME, NT / 2000, XP) consulted on 11.09.05 at 19:00, from http://www.edict.com.hk/PUB/concapp/.


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expressions draws on (Emmott 2006:441) “mental modeling5 rather than simply on what items are present in the text itself”, as formerly stated by Halliday and Hasan (1976). In this regard, Lyons (1995:293) defined reference as “the relation that holds between linguistic expressions and what they should stand for in the world”. Though departing from a different stand point (cf. Levinson 1983; Ariel 1990; Gundel et al. 1993; Chafe 1994, and Schiffrin 2006), Rozendaal (2008:23) advances that “referential expressions reflect different cognitive statuses and can as such be ordered along a continuum that ranges from high to low cognitive status”. Tanz (2009), in her turn, points to the two-fold dimension of a deictic term in her review of defining stances by Burks (1949) and Jakobson (1957), though stemming from different theoretical, but complementary frameworks, notably language philosophy and linguistics. Accordingly, it is a (1) symbol (Tanz 2009:1) “insofar as it is a conventionalized term, arbitrarily different from” another (I/You; here/there; this/that); and an (2) index as “it cannot represent its object without being in existential relation”, therefore belonging to “the late acquisitions of child language” (cf. Jakobson 1957, cited in Tanz 2009:2). 3.2 Interacting with reference Bearing in mind the target audience, namely 4-6 year-olds, issues related to their socio-cognitive development (Piaget 1954, 1962) will be taken into consideration throughout the study. Briefly put, children at this age range (pre-operational stage: 2.5 to 7-year-olds) have entered the so-called “symbolic stage”. They are described in the literature, as starting developing a global perception of things; showing eagerness to represent the world through images, as well as looking for an immediate representation of the objects, through words and images, yet, being led by creativity and intuition. At the textual level it seems rather difficult for 4-6 yearolds to interpret both endophoric and exophoric references in the narrative unless there is some non-linguistic device do facilitate its interpretation. “The dependency on physical context in particular, advances Rozendaal (2008:41) often leads to the identification of a specific entity”. By listening to stories read aloud by a mediator, children should be guided to focus on reference chains otherwise difficult to grasp at the textual level, even if they are coupled by illustrations. As such, states Rozendaal, greater demands are placed regarding language acquisition: “children must therefore not only learn the relevant morphosyntactic forms of referential expressions (e.g., determiners and pronouns), but also the pragmatic conditions under which these forms can or must be used”. Several authors have focused their research on children’s acquisition of reference, and particularly of deictic terms, in the last three decades. In Rozendaal’s crosslinguistic research on the acquisition of reference by children, “the acquisition of language is a significant step forward in children’s referential possibilities”. Reference is rightly defined as communicative act, in as much as 5

See also the cognitive stylistics framework developed by Stockwell (2002, 2008).

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speakers/children (Rozendaal 2008:23) “indicate the entity they want to communicate about”. She further contends (supported by Brown & Yule 1983; Brown 1995, Guidetti & Nicoladis 2008): Whereas gestures are bound to the here-and-now, words enable children to also talk about referents that are not perceptually available to the interlocutor. The acquisition of morphosyntax is an even further step, since reference can be achieved with different morphosyntactic forms (nouns with different types of determiners, pronouns or proper names).

After reviewing prior research, Rozendaal rightly questions (2008:31): (1) whether children “are able to apply these skills in language when they start refer linguistically”; (2) how children’s sensitivity to ‘givenness’ in discourse works. Research in the field has proved that from the age of two children are supposed to have “acquired many of the social-cognitive skills that are useful for reference”, and at three, children acquiring various languages are sensitive to some of the pragmatic factors that condition the use of determiners and nouns, pronouns and proper names. Hence, (Rozendaal 2008:30) the interpretation of pronouns “depends on the discourse context (anaphoric reference) or extralinguistic, physical context (deictic reference)”, as lacking descriptive content. In her claims the learning of reference (2008:30) “involves both the morphosyntactic and pragmatics” dimensions. It is, thus, noteworthy to mention some important findings on language acquisition as mentioned in Rozendaal’s study (2008:30, 35, 89, 90): (i) “morphosyntactic knowledge is assumed to be innate, whereas pragmatic and cognitive knowledge mature gradually or are acquired by experience. The interaction between these independently growing modules leads to gradual language acquisition.”; (ii) “demonstrative pronouns are amongst the first words used by English-speaking children”, borrowing from Brown (1973) and Wales (1986); (iii) “On the basis of parental reports, most possessive and reflexive pronouns appear to be used only after 2;6”, drawing on Fenson et al. (1994); (iv) “In the input, the masculine third person pronoun he, neuter pronoun it and demonstrative pronoun that appear to be very frequent”, supported by Laakso & Smith (2007), and among the “earliest pronominal referential expressions”. 3.3 Reference in English and Portuguese English and Portuguese are Indo-European languages: the former belongs to the Germanic branch, whereas Portuguese is a Romance language. Among the referential devices in these languages, namely nouns, determiners and pronouns, Table 1 gives an overview of demonstrative determiners and locatives in contrast, given their importance on encoding spatial distinctions. It seems that there is a difference between English and Portuguese in the number of forms of demonstrative and locatives for reference. The number of demonstrative determiner forms and locatives differs in English and Portuguese (See Table 1).


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Determiners do not mark grammatical gender before nouns in English unlike in Portuguese. The full paradigms of possessive determiners are comparable to those of possessive pronouns in English (Rozendaal 2008:41). Both the demonstrative determiner and the pronoun are encoded for number in English, but not for gender as in Portuguese: this / that are used before a singular noun and these / those before a plural noun; este/esse/aquele before a masculine singular noun and esta/essa/aquela before a feminine singular noun. Hence, the demonstrative binary that / those (the first of which is proximal, and the latter medium-distal and distal) have three equivalent forms in Portuguese: este/esse/aquele encoding specific spatial distinctions - proximal, medium-distal and distal, respectively, but making it more difficult for 4-year-olds to interpret. The resumptive non-inflected pronominal forms isto, isso, aquilo equally fall into the scope of the binaries this / that, in English. Occasionally, the demonstratives are disambiguated by the locatives over there (i.e., that / those over there) to account for the distinction between the proximal, the medium distal, and the distal (Almeida 2000). The locatives here/there in English correspond to the proximal aqui, the medium-distal ali, and distal acolá, in Portuguese. When it takes to disambiguate a further reference, the preposition over precedes the locative there so as to disambiguate spatial anchors. Table 1. Overview of locatives and demonstratives in Portuguese and English Deictic Expressions / Parts of Speech Locative - Place

Demonstrative Det.

Proximal

MediumDistal

here

there

(over) there

English

aqui /cá

ali

acolá

Portuguese

this / these

that / those

that / those (over there)

English

este (esta) / estes (estas)

esse (essa) / esses (essas)

aquele (aquela) / aqueles (aquelas)

Portuguese

this / these

that / those

that / those (one/s over there)

isto este (esta) / estes (estas)

isso esse (essa) / esses (essas)

aquilo aquele (aquela) / aqueles (aquelas)

Demonstrative Pron.

Distal

Languages

English

Portuguese

Cf. Halliday & Hasan (1976); Fonseca (1990); Almeida (2000); Emmott (2002, 2006) and Tanz (2009).

The study of time and space anchors has been at the core of many studies, with a focus on demonstrative determiners and locatives, for instance in a contrastive analysis in Portuguese and French (Almeida 2000), in English (Hidalgo 1998; Werth 1999; Aurnague, Hickmann & Vieu 2007; Emmott 2006; Tanz 2009), in English and Portuguese (Sousa 2008), or in Dutch, English and French (Rozendaal, 2008). How can the ‘little readers’ (→ pequenos leitores, in the Portuguese version) disambiguate the above mentioned abstract references, rather

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frequent (Sousa, 2008) in the textual dimension of Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio? In real communicative events, indexical reference coincides with participants’ “here and now”, whereas in the literary mode, the reference chains do not coincide with the current enunciative stance, because they are transposed to another realm, likely to be a future moment, a real past stance, or an imaginary dimension without time or place boundaries (Fonseca 1990:99). In this respect, Zwaan and Rapp (2006:740) refer to evidence suggesting “that elaborate spatial representations are not formed” unless: (i) “the spatial features of a text are particularly salient” or (ii) “readers are specifically instructed to focus on the spatial descriptions in a story”. They go on to argue that “the spatial dimension is more or less likely to be tracked as a function of its importance in the situation”. This is evidenced in the way events are described, with a chronological order and there is some empirical support that (Zwaan & Rapp 2006:745) “readers may actually take the visual perspective provided in a narrative” while focusing on time adverbials, grammatical cues, as well as (Sousa 2008) stylistic choices, such as repetition, anaphora and substitution. Departing from the fact that the ‘I’ takes his/her existence at the enunciative moment as a point of reference, in the pre-operational stage, it is predictable that time and place references are disturbing elements in the perception of exophoric and endophoric dimensions, as these go beyond readers’/listeners’ experiential, background and linguistic knowledge (Sousa 2008).

4 Encoding/Decoding space and time references Despite the fact that the narrator in the original version (1883) seems to know the narratees’ idiosyncrasies, the deictic parameters, regarding space, time and person at the textual level are not easily disentangled by young children (Butterworth 1990; Butterworth & Jarrett 1991; Bates et al. 1992). When leading the narratee to interact with unknown contexts, the narrator brings to the fore familiar places which are unexpectedly imbued of imaginary features, thus raising children’s curiosity. Hence, many deictic references (Clark & Marshall 1981) point to imaginary settings referred to and/or experienced by the characters interacting with Pinocchio in his trip in the diegetic world. The narrator, thus, skilfully leads readers to acknowledge concrete settings, imbued with fictional contours which trigger their curiosity and involve them with the process of meaning-making (cognition and emotion): “Um rei! – dirão imediatamente os meus pequenos leitores.” (Collodi 2004:5) / → “ ‘A king!’ my little readers will say immediately” (in The Adventures of Pinocchio, Page by Page Books, Chapter 1 [online]). There is a constant concern, explicitly stated by the narrator in various enunciative moments, to keep the human and social interaction, featuring the active and creative reading. As such, “Imagine…” (→Imaginem), to quote the imperative verb form used rather frequently by the narrator, who addresses the narratee on the discourse level, points to a form of human interaction


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facilitating the comprehension of indexical reference and aiming at a better understanding of the symbolic dimension. Protagonist, characters and narrator redirect the reader’s attention to outer spaces beyond the home environment which are difficult to be singled out from their context of occurrence. But how are these references evidenced in the simplified versions addressed at much younger readers, particularly 4 to 6-year-olds? Does the referential act lead to the correct identification of the intended entity by the interlocutor (Rozendaal 2008:23)? This is so much relevant as children are in the process of acquiring language, so mentions Rozendaal (2008:24): “not only do they have to acquire the relevant morphosyntactic forms for relevance, but also the different conditions under which these forms can or must be used”. In order to define cohesion, Halliday and Hasan (1976:4) state that it occurs “where the interpretation of some element in the text is dependent on that of another. The one presupposes the other, in the sense that it cannot be effectively decoded except by recourse to it.” For example, in utterances (1) and (2), the use of a pronoun he, in the English version, calls for the previous establishment of the referent, the noun Pinocchio (i.e., the entity to which he refers), in the information shared by the speaker and listener. (1) Pinocchio is a little wooden puppet who is magically brought to life by the Blue Fairy. But before he can become a real boy, he must show that he is brave, honest and unselfish (Ladybird books, p.1) [bold and underlining Mine]

In utterances (2), (3) and (4) there are three forms of the personal pronoun in Portuguese: object, o [→him] (2); an elliptical personal pronoun, ele (→ he; subject) before the verb form (3) in the past tense sabia (→knew; 3rd person)6; object direct (4), o (→ him); object indirect, lhe (→ him). (2) O polícia, julgando que Gepeto maltratava os seus bonecos, deteve o ancião e levou-o para a cadeia. (Collodi 2002:2) [→The police officer, thinking that Geppeto scolded his puppets, held the old man and arrested him.] (3) Pinóquio era tão perfeito que até sabia falar e (Collodi 2002:1) [→ Pinocchio was so perfect that (he) could even talk and walk.]

andar.

(4) A sorte foi que Gepeto regressou após alguns dias. Deu-lhe de comer, fez-lhe uns pés novos e comprou-lhe o abecedário para que ele fosse à escola. (Collodi 2002:4)

6 Because the verbs in Portuguese are inflected according to number and person, most times the personal pronoun, in subject position, is elliptical which makes it more difficult for children to track the reference chaining at the textual level.

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[→ Luckily, Geppeto returned some days later. He fed him, made a new pair of feet and bought a reader to him so that he would go to school.] [bold and underlining Mine]

The wider panoply of deictic references in Portuguese, conveyed by the pronouns ele/he, o/him, lhe/him, imply the (Wilson 2000:12) “triggering of mental operation or cognitive process in that language users make mental representations of recently mentioned information in anticipation of more inexplicit references”. So, a pronoun, as a deictic device, needs other elements in the discourse or nonlinguistic context to be interpreted (Rozendaal 2008). It involves pointing and naming the objects, people, situations or events they represent, thus resorting to substitution, by means of lexical and grammatical ties in sentences and utterances. Actually, personal pronouns, subject and object forms, are the most frequent referential devices occurring in both adapted and simplified versions of The Adventures of Pinocchio as evidenced in Table 2. Table 2. Occurrence of determiners (articles) and pronouns in Pinocchio (Ladybird Ed. 1987). Word Class Items Instances % Determiners the 28 (4.24%) an 1 (0.15%) Personal Pronoun (Subject) he 27 (4.08%) I 4 (0.61%) she 4 (0.61%) it 3 (0.45%) they 3 (0.45%) we 1 (0.15%) you 1 (0.15%) Personal Pronoun (Object) him 2 (0.30%) me 2 (0.30%) them 2 (0.30%) us 2 (0.30%) Possessives your 3 (0.45%) his 6 (0.91%) her 1 (0.15%) Its 1 (0.15%) Note: standardized calculations for a 1000 word basis / document bearing in mind the cohesive ties analysed (N= instances/Text: 661 words)

Concerning the deictic references related to time and space, as displayed in Table 3, the English version displays a relatively higher frequency of demonstratives. The demonstrative that occurs a couple of times (4 instances) and there is only one instance of the proximal this and the distal there in the English version. In the Portuguese version there are three instances of the locative ali (→ there) and one


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occurrence of aquele (→ that). Strikingly, the time reference now only occurs in the English version. Table 3. Occurrence of demonstratives and locatives in Pinocchio (Eng. / Port. versions) Word Classes English Version Portuguese Version Items Instances Items Instances % % Demonstratives that 4 (0.61%) aquele 1 (0.16%) this 1 (0.15%) Adverbs (locatives - place) there 1 (0.15% ali 3 (0.32%) Adverbs (locatives - time) now 4 (0.61%) Note: standardized calculations for a 1000 word basis / document bearing in mind the cohesive ties analysed (N= instances/Text: 661 words* and 948 words**)

A close analysis at the choice of the aforementioned linguistic forms seem to take into account the referent’s cognitive status7, as advanced by Rozendaal (supported on Gundel, Hedberg & Zacharski 1993), meaning (2008:25) “the assumed representation of the referent in the speaker’s and hearer’s memory and the extent to which the referent is active in memory”. The scholar goes on to explain the factors underlying the selection of form (2008:25): (a) whether the referent is uniquely identifiable (specific reference) or whether only a certain type of entity can be identified (nonspecific reference), (b) for referents that are specific, whether the referent has been mentioned before in discourse (‘givenness’) and is therefore activated in the minds of the conversation participants (c) for specific referents that are new to discourse, whether the referent is assumed to be familiar to the listener on the basis of previous knowledge or physical presence.

How are these indexical expressions disambiguated, bearing in mind that Pinocchio’s simplified versions, as most of the texts read to children have illustrations, in which there is an interplay between visual and verbal signs (Goodman 1996:69), therefore of multimodal nature (Kress & van Leeuwen 1996)?

5 Dynamic intersemiotic dialogue in multimodal simplified stories Children’s stories have been improved lately with regards to visual design, illustrations, imaginative formats and a wider array of graphological patterns and colours (Mesquita 2006). Also the types of images range from photographs, 7

Rozendaal discusses the concept of cognitive status of referents in the light of empirical research and borrowing from Gundel et al. (1993), as (2008:59) assumed representation of a referent in the speaker’s and hearer’s memory and the current level of activation of this referent in their consciousness.

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tapestries, mirrors, maps, or optical instruments, among other. The interrelationship of word and image in some texts adapted to young readers emphasize some of the fundamental issues in the process of representation itself. Taking examples (1) and (4), mentioned in section 4, target readers’ interaction with the textual and extra-textual reference chain is facilitated by the sort of strategies selected by writers and illustrators. In Figure 1, it is evidenced that pronouns should be preceded by matching nouns to which they refer in an intersemiotic continuum, because target readers need to be (Emmott 2006:442) “given the sort of information that needs to be drawn and hence indicates how schema knowledge and text world knowledge are used while reading a story or other types of text”. Zwaan and Rapp (2006:740) refer to evidence suggesting “that elaborate spatial representations are not formed” unless: (a) “the spatial features of a text are particularly salient”; or b) “readers are specifically instructed to focus on the spatial descriptions in a story”.

Figure 1. Personal pronoun reference in English (Ladybird Books, pp. 1-2)

Children’s curiosity is triggered when they look at a piece of wood, already familiar to them, associated with “that wooden puppet” as evidenced in the string, retrieved from the Portuguese version of the narrative. aquele (→ that) 1 itas e bonitas coisas. Mas nenhuma como aquele boneco de madeira, a quem deu o nome de


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[→In his long life as a carpenter, the old Geppeto had made many and beautiful things. But none as that wooden puppet, whom he gave the name of Pinocchio. Pinocchio was so perfect that he could even talk and walk.] [translation and emphasis Mine]

Figure 2. Endophoric references: encoding and decoding strategies (Everest Ed., p. 1)

Having a name assigned to the puppet, Pinóquio (rendered in block letters, in central position of the page), children are invited to associate it to “aquele boneco de Madeira” [→ that wooden puppet], that is, an unfamiliar item, of symbolic kind. It is given a name, which is repeated, so that children memorise the arbitrary representation of a wooden puppet as a living creature. The puppet is given motion and action which becomes a vivid image in the child’s mind. In this case pragmatic factors are associated with pragmatic functions of referents in discourse, as discussed by Rozendaal (2008:25), particularly, discourse new-reference, discourse-given-maintenance. The reader, and borrowing from Emmott (2006:442), “simply needs to recall the earlier scene in which the characters were present in a contextual frame”, that is Gepetto’s house and relations (see Figure 3), and make the assumption” that Pinocchio is related to Gepetto and the tiny cricket.

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Figure 3. Personal pronoun reference in Portuguese (Everest Ed., p. 4)

Setting the scene, or the premises, by coherently intertwining verbal and nonverbal language, corroborates the initial stage of the Labovian six part of a fullyformed oral narrative (the abstract, orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution and coda)8. Considering, for example, pages 6 and 7 in Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, it might be inferred that the young readers’ interaction with space and time references is facilitated by activating their semantic and conceptual maps in verbal and nonverbal language. In other words, borrowing from Emmott (2006:442), “for special stylistic uses, a writer may increase the lexical density in a reference chain to achieve special effects”, as displayed in Figure 4. Geppeto stands out, in the foreground, at a window pointing to the dark blue sky, redirecting readers’ attention to an outer space at the textual level. “That night” (“discourse-new referent”9) is offered a differing context from the one shared by young readers. By drawing on their own experience, background knowledge and vocabulary skills (concrete nouns like “night”, “star”, “sky” and “wishing star”), verbs of perception (“looked out”), and shifts in the focalization (direct and indirect speech), the writer involves the reader with a symbolic metaphoric world. The semantic continuum serves to stress thematic purposes (Emmott 2006). Because lexical density can lead to textual underspecification, in Emmott’s stance, the verbal is disambiguated by the non-verbal dimension. The 8 As pointed in McCabe and Peterson’s study8, the Labovian narrative structure can be applied to children’s narratives (cf. Kemper 1984, Kernan 1977, Umiker-Sebeok 1979 and Lambrou 2008). Although the scholars have studied the developmental acquisition pattern among 3½ to 9½ year-old subjects, it did not become predominant until children were six years of age. 9 “A referent that is identifiable and specific to the speaker, but mentioned for the first time in the current discourse, is termed discourse-new”, defines Rozendaal (2008:63). “The cognitive status of the referent then depends on the assumed degree of familiarity of the referent to the hearer (listener’s perspective). First, the referent may be part of the common ground between speaker and hearer prior to it being mentioned in discourse. This is called mutual knowledge.” (Clark & Marshall 1981; Clark & Bangerter 2004)


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visual representation of a cat on the windowsill marks the threshold to another dimension at the discourse level, namely that of the shining stars in the dark blue sky. Hence sensitivity to the new/given distinction is promoted in the multimodal text, conveyed in the interplay of verbal and non-verbal language in a continuum. Once again the accumulation of several aspects of non-verbal language contribute to young readers’ meaningful processing and comprehension of the message, namely: pointing (index finger), facial expressions, the character’s looking through the open window, darker colours, contrasting to brighter shining stars. Textual level (endophoric references)

Extratextual level (exophoric reference)

Abstract _______________________ “That Night” “star” “sky” “wishing star”

Context: Characters (Geppeto, Figaro) in central position, pointing and looking at the sky through the window.

Figure 4. Rewriting/encoding Strategies: Pinocchio (Ladybird Ed. 1987, pp. 6-7.)

Once the deictic “that” has been mentioned on page six (ladybird Ed., 1987) and related to “night” (i.e., previously shared knowledge about the referent) in the conversation of the participants in the diegetic world (Geppeto and Figaro), the young reader is able to associate it with other noun phrases, i.e., “moment”, or “wooden boy”. These mark some distance from the readers’ own stance to a further dimension on the textual level. On the contrary “this” refers to a proximal entity home, home environment - in the background in all scenes. Thus, “familiarity with a discourse-new referent can also arise”, claims Rozendaal (2008:63), “if the referent is physically present (exophoric reference, esp.). In this case, the referent is accessible in the non-linguistic context”. this 1

ow!” “Home?” said Stromboli. “This is your home!” And he locked P

that 1 2 3

ht become a real boy! (7) At that moment the room where Pinocchi ed Pinocchio in a cage. (17) That night, the Blue Fairy came aga named Gideon, “We could sell that wooden boy to Stromboli’s Danc

As for the locative ali (→ there), it seems (Zwaan and Rapp 2006:45) “the spatial dimension is more or less likely to be tracked as a function of its importance in the

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situation” and “readers may actually take the visual perspective provided in a narrative” while focusing on time adverbials, grammatical cues, as well as (Sousa 2008) stylistic choices, such as repetition, anaphora and substitution. ali (→there) 1 ir para o exterior e nadar até à praia. Ali, a fada esperava-os. - Estou certa que j 2 Pinóquio nadou até à ilha mais próxima e ali apareceu novamente a fada. 10 - Estou 3 e lhe perguntou como tinha chegado até ali. Pinóquio disse algumas verdades e... mu

Concerning the time anchorage, “now”, it only occurs in the English version. Yet, it might raise an impediment in its comprehension by the child-reader (cf. concordance lines on the node “now”). now 1 2 3 4

er to tell a lie again. (20) ou!” he said. “I’m going home , honest and unselfish. (10) Geppetto was overjoyed, for

Now ‘Honest’ John and his friend G now!” “Home?” said Stromboli. “Thi Now, living in Geppetto’s fireplac now Pinocchio was just like a son

The pictures accompanying the scenes illustrating the passages from which the strings were selected via corpus analysis seem more related to action than to disambiguating the referent, so the cognitive status of the referent is much lower.

Figure 5. Walt Disney’s Pinocchio, Ladybird Books, 1987, pp. 2, 11

The gap between the child’s physical positioning at the time of textual interaction will be taken for the time setting shared by the participants in the diegetic world. Following Rozendaal’s words, (p. 63) “the referent is not familiar to the hearer prior to its mention. He can only form an adequate representation if the speaker introduces the referent with an appropriate referential expression. This is most often a noun with an indefinite determiner.” Actually, elicits Rozendaal (2008:63),


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if the referent is physically absent (endophoric reference), the hearer cannot rely on the non-linguistic context to identify the referent. The speaker must take account of this by choosing a linguistic device that signals low cognitive status and that is lexically informative enough to enable the hearer to form a representation of the referent.

6 Data discussion The analysis of the occurrence of demonstrative and pronominal references in context has uncovered repetitive ways of establishing a reference chaining and its encoding/decoding: drawing on “givenness”, “familiarity” and mutual knowledge towards a specific discourse-new referent (Rozendaal 2008:31); promoting joint reference and the interaction with symbols (Bates et al. 1992); top-down – bottomup reading interaction with the text (Goodman 1970; Goodman & Flemming 1969). As for the disambiguation of the locatives here and now, these can only be gradually grasped through repetition at different points in the narrative sequence. The child may get familiar to the time gap while listening to the adult reader/mediator in the reading process. The meaningful interaction with the familiar objects from the real world facilitates the child’s grasp of imaginary ones (Mesquita 2006). Indeed, the production of images comprises in Mesquita’s stance (2006) one of the core tasks of the reading/interpreting activity. At this point writers and illustrators play an important role in helping the child/reader bridge the gap between the real world and the imaginary one, on the discourse level, by focusing their attention to the representation of a window, a door, pointing (index finger) or a meaningful look/gaze marking the direction to outer spaces (displayed on the visual medium). Moreover, reading aloud to children, or telling the story while showing the pictures contributes to children’s lexical and syntactic awareness. Young readers / listeners play an active role in filling in the gaps between dimensions, the endophoric (textual) and exophoric (extra-textual) so as to appropriate the identity of the text. This way, children make sense of their own creative lexis, disruptive grammar of their own speech. Social interaction fosters the move to referential communication, advances Butterworth (1999), supported on Vygotsky (1978), while fostering routines for the child to focus both on the same object and most importantly on the comprehension of pointing, or a gaze towards an object already referred, among other. Both the activation of semantic and conceptual mappings, guiding the whole narrative process, and the interpretation of the deictic references, seem facilitated by the resource to non-verbal language, images/illustrations, thus fostering immediacy (Sousa 2008). This leads the young addressees to the level of action by simulation, when they are themselves thrown into the imaginary dimension. The analysis of inter-semiotic coherence, with a focus on the dialogue between the word and the image, has led to interactive and creative readings of the narrative, namely by shifting but dynamic focalisation, which is likely to be

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identified upon the deictic references perceived by readers. In other words, several types of language, verbal and non-verbal ones, interact on the textual level, thereby facilitating readers’ comprehension of the message. Researchers have advocated that promoting the acquisition and growth of vocabulary is strongly associated to building on background knowledge relevant to the text (Ewers & Brownson 1999). Semantic mappings have been also used to increase reading comprehension by identifying, for instance, temporal-spatial relationships.

7 Conclusion The dynamic intersemiotic dialogue indebted to multimodal simplified fictional texts challenges the children/readers with different but sequenced perspectives which contribute to their comprehension of space and time references conveyed by indexical references like “here” / “there” (→ aqui / ali) “now” (→ agora), “this” / “that” (este / esse/ aquele). The careful selection of a limited number of indexical expressions, likely to foster (Emmott 2004:43) “readers’ textspecific knowledge”, contribute to readers’ holding “a mental representation of the words of text, as opposed to the meaning denoted by these words”. These cohesive ties point to imaginary and/or real settings which end up promoting a creative and interactive reading of the story. In the process of meaning-making, visual literacy, language acquisition and literary literacy are gradually promoted in children’s preschool experiences through stories and books. As suggested in the title, the approach to the study of reference and its interpretation in simplified versions of texts, both in Portuguese and English, read at 4- to 6-year-olds, has not been exhaustive, given the limited corpus under scope; it has rather discussed some of the strategies devised by writers/translators to facilitate addressees’ interaction with reference. The analysis of illustrated versions of stories has uncovered repetitive patterns of use of non-verbal language to trigger children’s sensitivity to the interaction between the morphosyntax and pragmatics of reference, thus shedding some light on the way to promote the interaction with reference among 4- to 6year-olds. Furthermore, this study has spelt out similarities in both versions, Portuguese and English, in the strategies of illustrating the reference chaining in an intersemiotic continuum, both in the input and in child language. The dynamic intersemiotic dialogue indebted to multimodal simplified fictional texts selected for this study seems to challenge the children/readers with different perspectives. These may contribute to their gradual comprehension of space and time references conveyed by indexical references like “here” / “there”, “now”, “this” / “that”, if they frequently experience shared reading activities. Yet, there were fewer deictic terms in the Portuguese version with a larger number of words in the text. It might be inferred that there was higher concern with the target audience and their sociocognitive development.


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