SINTAKSIČKA SLOŽENOST NARATIVNIH I ARGUMENTATIVNIH TEKSTOVA UČENIKA TREĆEG I ČETVRTOG RAZREDA OSNOVNE ŠKOLE

The purpose of the study was to determine the effect of mode of discourse, i.e. narratives and argumentatives on the syntactic complexity of compositions written by nine and ten-year-old children. Subjects were divided in two various age groups (all together 84) and they were all writing two essays each, so the whole corpus consisted of totally 168 texts. The compiled material analysis included the quantitative and the qualitative examples. The quantitative indicators of text length – the average number of words was examined attended together with the number of communicative sentences and clauses in the text, while the complex sentence length was measured by an average number of words and average number of dependent clauses that were the parts of sentences. Qualitative analysis registered and examined the appearance of various sentence types – simple, compound, complex and complex-compound sentences. At both modes of discourse, text length in fourth grade was significantly greater than in third grade. At both grade levels the sentence length in argumentatives was significantly greater than in narratives. The results were much more valuable because they are concerned with examining the syntax with children who are Serbian language native speakers.