The development of Hebrew conjunct constructions in narration

The language of school writing: a developmental comparison of genres across the school years

“…The syntactic measures focused on four categories that have been shown to characterize written text production in Hebrew-speaking higher grade levels and adults. First, conjunct structures, coordinating structures attached to a single unit as in success is critical in life and in school, where critical governs in life and in school (Ravid, 2013;Ravid & Hershkovitz, 2017); complement clauses, typically composed of a mental or dicendi verb followed by a clause delineating the content of the mental of saying activity, e.g., he explained that failure might occur; headless relative clauses, e.g., someone who received a low grade; and relative clauses, e.g., a device that changed our lives. While relative clauses are known to characterize richer academic language (Brandes & Ravid, 2016;: van Rijt, van den Broek, & De Maeyer, 2021, this is the first time we examine the frequencies of headless relatives and complement clauses in the development of text production.…”

“…In Hebrew, special attention has been paid to the developing linguistic features of text production abilities across the school years, such as high-register lexicon (Ravid, 2004;Ravid & Berman, 2009); optional inflectional morphology (Cahana-Amitay & Ravid, 2000); derived, abstract nouns (Ravid, 2006;Ravid & Avidor, 1998;Ravid & Cahana-Amitay, 2005); compounding structures (Ravid & Zilberbuch, 2003); denominal and syntactically expanded adjectives (Berman, Naydic & Ravid, 2011;Ravid & Levie, 2010; large noun phrases ; prepositional phrases (Brandes & Ravid, 2016); adverbial clauses (Brandes & Ravid, 2019); conjunct structures (Ravid & Hershkovitz, 2017); and a plethora of other morpho-syntactic, discursive and content measures (Berman, 2018;Ravid, Dromi, & Kotler, 2009). Across all of these domains in diverse studies, the highregister, abstract, lexically specific, alternative linguistic devices characterizing richer, advanced language increased with age and schooling, especially in later adolescence and in adulthood as compared to younger writers.…”

“…Conjunct structures, as in young children already consolidate their self appreciation and self perception from early on (conjoined elements bolded), constitute a arena of much relevance to the development of writing in Hebrew. While being a coordinating rather than subordinating device, Ravid (2013) and Ravid and Hershkovitz (2017) show that this construction is one of the earliest emerging harbingers of complex syntax in Hebrew, as several phrases are conjoined to a single syntactic construct, containing or being contained by other syntactic devices. Headless relative clauses and relative clauses both attach to a nominal head and expand it while referring to the matrix nominal (Corrêa, 2018;Lau & Tanaka, 2021;O'Grady, 2011).…”