Simona Kranjc
Skladnja in otroski govor
Syntax And Child Speech
Slovenski sinopsis
English synopsis
English summary
Slovenski sinopsis
Avtorica v clanku prikazuje razvoj skladenjskih teorij od Chomskega v 50. letih do kognitivne lingvistike v 90. letih. Skladenjsko teorijo aplicira na posebno zvrst gradiva, to je otroski govor, ki kaze veliko vecino znacilnosti jezikovnega sistema, kot se uresnicuje v besedilih v dolocenih funkcijah.
English synopsis
The author reviews the development of syntactic theories from Chomsky in the 1950s to cognitive linguistics of the 1990s. Syntactic theory is applied to a special type of linguistic material, viz. child speech, which displays most of the properties of a language system as realised with relation to particular functions in texts.
English summary
According to functional linguistics, the function of grammar is related to encoding and decoding messages. Grammar is defined as a conventionalised and schematised series of form-meaning pairs. This series is realised in a form that is an actual or possible utterance. Meaning is treated as such a broad category that it includes all conceptualisation as well as the communicative function and the extralinguistic aspects of a speech act. Schematisation or a schema is a summary of the form or meaning. Typically it is used to describe permanency is a large series of occurrences of forms or meanings. In this interpretation of grammar, all grammatical forms have a conceptual foundation, even though this foundation may frequently be very abstract. Therefore there is no clear demarcation line between grammar, semantics and pragmatics, as the grammatical description includes also semantic and pragmatic structures.
This concept of grammatical description may also be applied to child speech. The empirical material provides evidence that children begin to develop an awareness of the sentence constituent structure at an early stage of speech development. The process is of course happening on a subconscious level, but it is reflected in children's texts. Their utterances allow us to draw conclusions about primary and secondary structures in sentences that are potential sentences of a particular language.
