PERSONAL PRONOUNS AND PRO-DROP IN THE EARLY STAGES OF LANGUAGE ACQUISITION

The grammatical, semantic and communicative features of both verb and non-verb based utterances with personal pronouns of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd persons in the subjective position (Nom.) are considered. Particular attention is paid to pronoun drop in verb-based utterances containing verbs in the present and future tenses. The study is based on the longitudinal corpora, transcribed and morphologically coded in accordance with CHILDES conventions (B. MacWhinney), of two typically-developing monolingual boys (1;7–3;1) who are acquiring the Russian language, it being a morphologically rich and infl ectional language, with so-called weak pro-drop. The results obtained are based on an analysis of more than 7,000 child utterances and indicate the general and individual aspects of the acquisition of this fragment of grammar. Similarities and diff erences in the functioning of utterances with personal pronouns during the fi rst year of their emergence in the children’s speech are confi rmed statistically. A strong positive correlation was noted between the frequency of verb-based utterances with personal pronouns and the syntactic development of the children, determined by the mean length of utterances. Moreover, in a denser pronominal corpus, the frequency of these utterances correlates with the frequency of the pro-drop.