Subjectivity, individuality and singularity in children: a socially constituted subject

Abstract

Considering the hypothesis that Bakhtin and his Circle’s reflections can help us think about issues involving the field of Language Acquisition, in addition to the fact that there are only a few works developed within this perspective in Brazil, in this article, we intend to discuss the notions of “subject”, “subjectivity”, “individuality” and “singularity”, drawing on Bakhtin’s theory. Thus, in order to make this discussion clearer, we bring data from the speech of young children, from 1.8 to 3 years old, who were filmed in natural contexts interacting with their parents and relatives. From these data, we could verify, among other things, that children, as individuals who constitute themselves as subjects in and through language, bring marks to their discourse, revealing their subjectivity (through lexical, morphological, syntactic or genre choices).