Benveniste’s theory on personhood and its unfolding in child enunciation

Authors

  • José Temístocles Ferreira Junior Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco – UFRPE
  • Valdir do Nascimento Flores Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS
  • Marianne Carvalho Bezerra Cavalcante Universidade Federal da Paraíba – UFPB

Keywords:

Child enunciation, Benveniste, person category, subjective anchoring.

Abstract

The purposes of this study are to discuss Benveniste´s theory (1988,1989)as regards the person category in language and to examine its implicationsin child enunciation. To this end, Benveniste´s approach to enunciationwill be revisited with the purpose of highlighting some issues related tothe theory of personhood. After that, we will analyze illustrative datain order to discuss the emergence and functioning of person indices inchild speech. The corpus consists of data drawn from Ferreira Júnior´sprevious research (2009) involving three children engaged in spontaneousinteraction with their respective mothers. The results indicate that thereare enunciative mechanisms underlying child speech that comprise modesof appropriation of the language system and modes of subject’s engagementin discourse.

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Published

2015-07-01

How to Cite

Ferreira Junior, J. T., Flores, V. do N., & Cavalcante, M. C. B. (2015). Benveniste’s theory on personhood and its unfolding in child enunciation. DELTA: Documentação E Estudos Em Linguística Teórica E Aplicada, 31(2). Retrieved from https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/delta/article/view/26392

Issue

Vol. 31 No. 2 (2015)

Section

Articles