Pronouns functioning as direct objects in the speech of Russian-language children

Abstract

The study is devoted to Russian pronouns which children use in grammatical position of a direct object. The aim of the research is to consider the distinctive features of the pronouns belonging to different semantic groups. Additionally, the paper is an effort to answer the question if the connection between the position of the object in the sentence and the semantics of the pronoun is relevant when mastering the language, i.e. to discover pronouns of what classes are more likely to be associated with the object syntactic function in children’s speech. Corpus recordings of children’s speech, namely the data from longitudinal observations of children’s speech, comprise the material of the study. The basic research method employed is the functional-semantic analysis of utterances. As a result of the performed study, it was found that direct objects denoted by pronouns in the accusative case appear in most children’s speech in the third year of life. As for the frequency of occurrence of accusative case forms in a child’s speech, pronoun classes differ from one another; this is partly caused by their semantics. There is a clear distinction between deictic pronouns and quantifiers: children use the latter (negative, indefinite, universal) more often in the object position. Four semantic characteristics are associated with the frequency of occurrence of object forms. The first one is inanimateness: inanimate pronouns and pronouns referring to inanimate referents take the object position more often than animate pronouns. The next characteristic is anaphoricity or the anaphoric nature of pronouns: pronouns referring to another word in a child’s speech are more often in the accusative case than other pronouns. The non-concreteness or lack of reference to a concrete referent which is directly observable in the communication situation also influences the frequency of occurrence: indefinite and negative pronouns turn out to be the most "objective" for children. Finally, another characteristic is generalisation, or a reference to a group of referents: the pronoun vsyo (all, everything) occupies a prominent position on the "object" scale. The influence of semantic factors is not noted when using adjective pronouns incorporated into nominal groups dependent on nouns in the accusative case and also when using non-canonical objects (the adverbs kak (how), tak (so) and subordinate complement clauses (sentential actants) with relative pronouns.