In the first person: Pronoun-verb utterances in Russian children’s speech
DOI:10.30842/alp2306573720198142
Kazakovskaya V. V. Ot pervogo litsa:
mestoimenno-glagolnyye vyskazyvaniya v russkoy detskoy rechi.
Acta Linguistica Petropolitana. 2024. 20(1): 98–142.
Based on the data of three longitudinal corpora of child speech focusing on typically developing Russian-speaking children (1;8–3;0), the study addresses the acquisition of the 1st person pronoun forms in the Nominative case in combination with verbs belonging to the grammatical center of personality. Spontaneous speech data were transcribed and morphologically coded according to CHILDES [MacWhinney 2000]. The analysis also accommodates Gvozdev’s diary observations on the grammatical structure formation in his son’s speech [1949, 1990].
For the first time, the development of the subject-predicate agreement mechanism is juxtaposed with the formation of the propositional relationship, whose means of expression are interpreted as the language of the Theory of Mind (ToM), that is mental state language. Its initial representatives in child speech are egocentric elements with epistemic semantics in the natural dialogue, such as navernoe ‘probably’, mozhet byt’ ‘maybe’, konechno ‘of course’, deystvitel’no ‘really’ used with respect to the speaker (the 1st person).
The conditions triggering the grammatical processes under study are identified. Thus, the trigger for the pronoun-verb agreement is the verb spurt while the use of epistemic markers seems to be impossible without successful first-person agreement, and it is at this stage that they appear sporadically in children’s speech. Later, epistemic markers, being a reduced version of the mental modus, come to be used along with their unreduced/full variants, such as Ya dumayu / (ne) znayu / boyus, chto (P) ‘I think / (don’t) know / am afraid that (P)’. In its turn, the use of the first person verb utterances in the frame position becomes a prerequisite for the subsequent placement of you- and (s)he-subjects of the propositional evaluation into it. Their use signals the children’s ability not only to separate their own point of view from that of the Other, but also to put themselves into their own mental world.
The general and individual aspects of the acquisition of first person verb utterances occupying different syntactic positions are discussed. In particular, despite the similar frequency of the expression of temporal and communicative features of the proposition, the frequency of its modal vs. modus characteristics varies significantly. The obtained results correspond to the cognitive psychology conclusions on the different levels of ToM. Also, they are consistent with the analyses of mental state language in children’s written argumentative texts which showed a correlation between the frequency of the use of mental state language and the child’s academic success.
Keywords
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