Abstract: This is a PhD thesis aimed at analyzing the written register used by elementary school children from the municipality of Guamá, province of Santiago de Cuba —specifically, words and terms, and their statistical behaviour in texts written by those children. The objective of this study is to describe lexical performance in texts written by third to sixth grade elementary school children from the municipality of Guamá, based on some extralinguistic variables and in the light of new lexico-statistics and corpus linguistics criteria, in order to determine the relevance of words in the corpus under study. As a result, theoretical-methodological, experimental and practical contributions are made. The theoretical-methodological contributions are related to the defence of scientific accuracy and the proposal of a formula to calculate diffusion in corpora subdivided into n worlds. With respect to experimental input, the proposed indicators to measure the informants’ lexical performance in writing show that it increases with the progress of the schooling process; however, the objectives set by the Ministry of Education for each cycle are not achieved. The practical contributions, rate of lexical frequency and electronic text corpus are being helpful for the Ministry of Education to design a strategy to encourage schoolchildren’s lexical development in the areas included in the Turquino Plan . The Electronic Corpus offered as one of the work’s practical contributions is instrumental in computerizing knowledge in Cuba, especially in the field of social sciences. This corpus is registered in the CENDA (National Copyright Centre).
Author:
- Dr Celia M. Pérez Marqués