Children's speech development in the aspect "self-and-otherness"

The aim of the study is to analyze products of child speech activity in the aspect of "self-and-otherness" - that is to set distinction criteria between "self' and "otherness" and to determine the linguistic status of "otherness" in a child's speech. The concept "otherness" originated in the works by M.M. Bakhtin, and is used to refer to the analysis of pieces of literature rather than to language studies. But with the development of an intertextual approach in linguistics, many works began to study "otherness" in different products of human speech activity including everyday communication. The novelty of the proposed approach consists in researching children's speech products as linguistic objects containing elements created by a child and elements adopted by a child from other people's speech in a "ready-to-use" form. This approach distinguishes this research from many works which compare peculiarities of children's speech with the language system or its functioning. The main method of the research is the case-study method because the research is based on the analysis of a particular child's speech. The paper offers analysis of utterances of the author's daughter's at the age of two to four collected in a scientific diary with the author's linguistic commentaries and descriptions of communicative situations. The study allows concluding that the combination of "self-and-otherness" in the speech of a child acquiring the Russian language may be revealed in the aspects of morphology and derivation, in making decisions when choosing a proper word, in composing word combinations, and in producing long utterances. "Otherness" is considered as speech elements which a child understands as independent language blocks, and can combine them with each other. Among such elements are: (1) particular morphemes (endings, suffixes, prefixes); (2) particular word-forms understood by a child as independent language units equal to root morphemes or derivation bases; (3) particular words; (4) set collocations of words; (5) long phrases reproduced by a child as "ready-to-use" units. The key part in reproducing "others' elements" in the self-speech of a child is given to sound signs rather than to the word meaning. It goes without saying that a child constructs his/her own system of speech but this system is made out of the constructing material perceived from other people's speech. What makes a child's language system individual is a unique set of different elements adopted from other people's speech, and a possibility to combine these elements in a child's own way. The results of the study can be applied in linguistic courses discussing the problems of child language acquisition and in the practice of speech therapy (for example, during speech developing activities at kindergartens or nursery schools).

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