INTERROGATIVE PRONOUNS CHTO ‘WHAT’, KTO ‘WHO’, KAKOI ‘WHICH’ AND LINES OF THEIR DERIVATIVES IN THE L1 ACQUISITION

Abstract

The article examines the acquisition of pronouns of the lines kto ‘who’, chto ‘what’ and kakoi ‘which’, belonging to the interrogative, indefinite and negative groups, by Russian- speaking children. We have used longitudinal data, those being recordings of the speech of 5 children aged from 2 to 4 years. Analysis of the functional-semantic and morphological-syntactic features of pronouns in the speech of children allowed us to draw the following conclusions: children’s speed and ease of mastering the pronouns depends not only on their frequency in the input, but also on the internal linguistic features of each lexeme. The role is played by the combination of the function of a pronoun in a specific utterance, and the basic meaning of the series: for example, in the chto ‘what’ line such cognitively successful combination is “concreteness + objectivity”, and in the kto ‘who’ line “animacy” refers to the lesser level of “concreteness” (this may be explained by the later appearance of lexemes of this line in children’s speech). The line of kakoi ‘which’ demonstrates association between the attributive meaning and a) pure indefiniteness (including non-concreteness in irrealis) and b) deicticity, when primarily non-deictic interrogative kakoi ‘which’ and indefinite kakoi-to ‘some’ in the speech of children in relative-demonstrative, emphatic, and actualizing contexts approach the demonstrative takoi ‘such’. The development of the morphological and syntactic side of pronouns occurs in children without significant difficulties: there are almost no mistakes in the word formation, although children often follow a strategy close to the strategy of avoidance: children prefer to use only the initial forms of pronouns (including the Gen. forms of negative pronouns), so these pronouns adopt certain adverbial traits in the speech of young children and can be seen as unchangeable. The main syntactic features are the use of pronouns within typical constructions, acquired on the whole, and a large number of interrogative sentences in which the pronoun is not transferred to the beginning. Refs 26.