Kazakh Folklore and Children’s Texts: Pragmatic and Semantic Transformations of Narrative in Didactic Practice

This article examines how structural-semantic transformations reorganize cohesion, causal coherence, event sequence, and narrative functions in Kazakh folklore-didactic and children’s narratives. While level-based textual modification is commonly described in terms of lexical, syntactic, and quantitative simplification, less attention has been paid to how individual transformations affect referential continuity, causal recoverability, genre framing, characterization, and the overall pragmatic effect of a narrative. The study therefore aims to determine how these textual relations and functions change under two degrees of transformation, represented by A1 and A2 versions, and which components remain invariant in coherent transformed narratives. The corpus comprised eight Kazakh source narratives and sixteen purpose-built A1 and A2 versions, organized into eight aligned original-A1-A2 sequences. A total of 612 transformational segments were analyzed using a two-level coding model that distinguished six primary operations – structural compression, syntactic simplification, lexical substitution, semantic reduction, causal explication, and neutralization of imagery from their effects on textual organization. Preservation of the functional narrative core was treated as a control category of functional continuity. The findings show that A1 transformation relies more strongly on compression, syntactic redistribution, repeated reference, and a linear event sequence, whereas A2 retains a denser network of source-text relations and more frequently makes causal connections explicit. Syntactic splitting shifts cohesive relations from intra-sentential structures to inter-sentential linkage, while causal explication compensates for contextual relations weakened by compression. Genre framing, characterization, and conflict presentation may be reduced or recast without disrupting the central event structure. Macro-level coherence depends on the recoverability of the functional chain linking the principal participant, key event, motive or causal relation, plot resolution, and the narrative’s overall pragmatic effect. The proposed model contributes to the linguistic analysis of transformed narratives by relating formal operations to their consequences for cohesion, causal coherence, event sequence, and narrative function.