Language Specificities of Moja Zlatna dolina on the Basis of Text Analysis

Sa？etak The collection of autobiographical stories Moja Zlatna dolina (My Golden Valley) is the most successful and best-known work of the author Zlata Kolari？-Ki？ur, who was born in Slavonski Brod, and who spent her childhood and a part of her adolescence in Po？ega. Though the stories were written at a certain time distance from childhood, the author nevertheless nostalgically talks about past events, the details of games, jokes, persons, and the scenery of her childhood. She recollects the significant events and persons in a chronological order, the final event being her departure from the Golden Valley. This is why Zlata Kolari？-Ki？ur is considered one of local authors of the Po？ega region, and her collection of stories about her childhood in the Golden Valley has been included among mandatory readings for the fourth grade of primary school, so the teachers can choose to read and analyse it with their pupils. However, the research (Aladrovi？ Slova？ek and Mari？, 2014) has shown that teachers rarely choose this work, because they consider it uninteresting and inappropriate for the pupils of this age in terms of language and style. Therefore, the objective of this research is to analyse the language and style of My Golden Valley using the programme for computer text analysis – NooJ (Silberztein, 2016). At the linguistic level, the text analysis will determine the number of tokens; lexical density; the most frequent collocations of words and sentence structures; it will moreover describe the varieties of lexis and style. The results of the analysis and the given corpus will be compared with Croatian children’s corpus and the results of the analysis of the novel The Marvellous Adventures and Misadventures of Hlapi？ the Apprentice written by Ivana Brli？ Ma？urani？ (Cviki？, Aladrovi？ Slova？ek and Bekavac, 2015), which is on the list of mandatory readings for the third grade of primary school. Aiming at achieving the most relevant possible results, the selected language examples will serve as test of lexical competence of the fourth grade pupils (N = 80) in order to determine its level, as well as the receptiveness of pupils for the narrative text My Golden Valley in terms of language and style