The grammatical aspect of personal pronoun acquisition

The article discusses the grammatical aspect of learning personal pronouns in the Russian language. Studying the specific features of their use in the first year of ontogenesis sheds light on the formation of predicative relations, the agreement (coordination) mechanism of the subject and the predicate, the development of types and forms of the subject and the predicate. The paper traces the stages of predication involving personal pronouns. In particular, it examines the prerequisites for coordination and identifies the typical properties of Ya- / I-, ty- / you- and on- / he-utterances in children’s speech. The material for the analysis is three longitudinal corpora of audio and video recordings (70 hours) of dialogic interaction between adults and typically developing young children. Spontaneous speech was transcribed and coded in accordance with international standards. The study has shown that predicative relations develop from a syncretic representation of the subject and predicate components to a disjunct one, from the absence of formal agreement between them to its presence, from the verbless use of personal pronouns to the verbal one. The common and individual features of the functioning of utterances with personal pronouns in the informants’ speech are confirmed statistically.