A realização do sujeito no português brasileiro em período de aquisição da linguagem: uma proposta descritiva

Abstract

This research aimed to describe and discuss syntactic aspects concerning children's speech, observing and analyzing what the data from children between 4 and 7 years old shows about the subject in Spec-TP. It was verified, for example, whether the child in the acquisition phase of the Brazilian Portuguese language tends to fill in the area destined for the subject, or if it does not fulfill this subject phonetically. To acquire a language, To acquire a language, a child needs both its biological development and its linguistic experiences, and will go through linguistic stages that can be analyzed from his language performance, as stated by Bloom (1997), Hyams (1986), Magalhães (2006). If the Brazilian Portuguese allows constructions like: i) eu comprei roupas; ii) Ø comprei roupas; iii) ele/você/a gente foi a festa esse final de semana; or iv) Ø foi a festa esse final de semana, and such constructions are the input to which children are exposed, the collected data will likely present these syntactic construction possibilities. And if, according to Cyrino, Duarte, and Kato (2000) and Duarte and Kato (2014), Brazilian Portuguese behaved as a partially null subject language and showed variations in the occurrence between null and filled subjects, this is expected to influence children's syntactic realization. As well as the agreement feature, referentiality, animacy and specificity are aspects that influence the subject’s realization, since the more referential the subject, the more chances of there being Spec-TP completion in Brazilian Portuguese. According to the studies conducted so far, the 1st and 2nd discourse persons tend to occur more phonetically realized than null, as they are pronouns with [+ referentiality]; the 3rd person, however, as it also encompasses objects or things, will depend, for its realization, on other traits, such as the [+human] or [-human] trait.As this is the reality of Brazilian Portuguese, and children are exposed to these constructions from an early age, we verified these occurrences in their linguistic production. Thus, we can present some features found such as: i) occurrence of the singular pronoun people in all age groups; ii) low occurrence of the plural pronoun people; iii) no occurrence of the pronoun - tu; iv) there is a preference for the pronoun - a gente; and v) although there is an oscillation related to the filling or not of the subject, due to the input to which the children are exposed, it tends to fill the referential pronominal subject. To check the Portuguese's properties in children's speech, data was collected through recordings of conversations between children and their caretakers in a relaxed situation and then analyzed based on the theoretical framework produced in the area, especially the postulates of generative grammar. Thus, the present study serves as a means to verify how children are producing the subject in their mother tongue: Brazilian Portuguese.