The paper carries out functional and grammatical analysis of a corpus of picture-based essays written by children of 10-12. The paper pays special attention to the initial sentences considered in sense of the type of construction, temporal organization and the syntactic category of person. The paper proves the idea that most of 11-year old children follow one of the two text narrating tactics and mark the beginning of their stories by special syntactic or lexical markers (continuous zhil-byl ‘there lived' phrase, discrete indefinite odnazhdy ‘once' temporal lexeme). Nevertheless, some of children don't distinguish between the “existence” and “event” clearly and mix the markers. When telling a story, children often use past tense forms but not present tense ones, the latter are possible though. Generally, perceptive introductions are not frequent to appear. Among the corpus, 3d person narratives dominate over 1st person ones. ‘I' is inclusive in a fictional story as far as the author takes the role of a narrator, an observer or a character (not only a human being but also an animal character).
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Onipenko, Nadezhda; Nikitina, Elena. Grammar of introductive sentences in narrative texts by children // Problems of Ontolinguistics — 2024. Proceedings of the International Scienitific Conference. Saint Petersburg, 2024, pp. 19–25.