engleski

Emergence and early production of the 1st person singular in Croatian: the case of overt pronominal and null subjects

The acquisition of reference is one of the central topics in the study of language development. Referential expressions convey different morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic information, so children need to learn which expressions to use for referring in specific communicative situations. Previous studies have mostly focused on the emergence and production of reference in the 1st and/or 2nd person singular. The common assumption is that children acquiring pro-drop languages go through an initial stage of null subjects, followed by the increasing use of overt pronominal subjects, namely personal pronouns. Chronologically, the cut-off point between the two stages appears to be around the age of two. However, it has also been found that children’s referential behaviour differs due to cross-linguistic differences in the availability of referential expressions. The present study investigates the emergence and production of the 1st person singular in children acquiring Croatian. We addressed the following research questions: 1) At what age do children begin to produce overt pronominal and null subjects in the 1st person singular? 2) What is the prevalence of overt pronominal versus null subjects in the 1st person singular marking? 3) Does the prevalence of overt pronominal versus null subjects in the 1st person singular marking change with age? The analysis was conducted on language samples from three children, recorded from the beginning of speech until the age of about 3 years old. All utterances with a verb in the 1st person singular were extracted from the Croatian corpus of child language (Kovačević 2002) and coded by subject type (overt pronominal vs null). The results show that children begin to use pronominal and null subjects in 1st person singular before the age of 2. Null subjects are more frequent than overt pronominal subjects from the beginning of 1st person singular production. Two children show a null-subject stage at the onset of 1st person singular production, while one child shows a stage of overgeneralization of the overtly produced 1st person singular pronoun. The prevalence of null subjects over overt pronominal subjects in 1st person singular is constant throughout the period studied, with the exact ratios changing with age.

Reference ; 1st person singular ; Language acquisition ; Pro-drop ; Croatian

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