A FUNCTIONAL DESCRIPTION OF THE NARRATIVES PRODUCED BY KURDISH-PERSIAN BILINGUALS

In this paper, we try to discuss some functional categories and their formal expressions in some Kurdish and Persian narratives, as classified by Berman & Slobin (1994). In order to achieve this goal, four Kurdish-Persian bilinguals narrated Mercer Mayor’s book known as “The Frog Story”. The collected data were analyzed to see how these concepts are expressed in either language and to see to what extent those functional categories are reflected in children’s narratives. Here, we have focused on such functional categories as tense, voice, and focus, reflected in the Kurdish and Persian narratives. Based on our analysis, we concluded that Kurdish and Persian narratives follow specific conventions to express these categories and showed some differences and similarities in this respect; For example present perfect and simple past are more frequently seen in Kurdish narratives while Persian tends to use simple present and present progressive instead. Additionally, the participants used more lexical temporal items in their Kurdish rather than Persian stories.