La Estructura y Dinámica de la Propiedad

The first-person pronoun jag ‘I’ is normally pronounced “ja” in colloquial Swedish, and this is how it is normally transcribed in the journals. For both boys the very first instances show up in clearly holophrastic strings and also in a post-verbal position: “tyst, sa ja” [quiet, said I] ‘be quiet, I said’ (H 1;10; uttered in an angry voice); “hä komme ja” [here come I] (B 1;9). Both utterances are followed by a comment that they seem to have been picked up from the other children (at the childminder’s or the day care centre).

For Hugo there are a total of five early sporadic instances of jag, registered from 1;10 to the very beginning of 2;1, i.e., over a period of three months. Two of them show the pronoun in clause-initial position, both instances reported as somewhat uncertain: “ja sitta dä” (H 1;11; together with the comment “I think I heard him say this, but I am not sure”), “ja hoppa(r) sängen” (H 2;0; when jumping in the bed; with

the comment that it is uncertain whether or not it was possible to hear the pronoun). Two utterances have the pronoun in a post-verbal position, and I have spontaneously interpreted both as yes/no-questions, with a target-like V1 word order: “pela ja?” [play I] ‘shall/may I play’ (H 1;11; when he was holding his toy guitar in his hand), “klippo bamsen ja” [cut teddy.the I] ‘may I cut the fur of the teddy?’ (H 2;1; with the comment: “again I think that I can hear him say jag when referring to himself”). The first utterance seems to be a question for pragmatic reasons; the second utterance lacks enough contextual information to decide. In adult Swedish the V1-question normally has interrogative prosody, but there is no information of this kind in the diary. During one single week in the middle of 2;1, the first-person singular pronoun is registered eight times, and after this the observations are regular.

For Bruno there is only one early observation of jag registered (at 1;9, cf. above) before it is reported to be frequently heard both at 1;11 and at 2;0. The entry in the diary notes that

B now says *Bruno when referring to himself, for instance when he answers the question “Vad heter du?” ‘What is your name?’ Otherwise he talks quite often about himself as “ja” jag ‘I’ or “maj” mig ‘me’. He very often says “ja (e) lillebo” [I (am) little brother], and he was also very fascinated by the boy who was “little brother” in the Swedish Advent calendar on TV [an annual television show for children starting on the first of December and ending on Christmas-eve]. (B 1;11)

At 2;0 there is an entry that apparently summarises the latest development, noting that Bruno uses quite a lot of supine forms, that he has used the modal vill ‘want to’ for a long time and now also has kan ‘can’ and måste ‘must’, and that he often uses “ja” in clauses. If this observation is correct one may conclude that three types of functional morphemes (functional verbs, pronouns and verbal morphology) seemingly begin to appear or even become relatively frequent more or less simultaneously in Bruno’s productive language and that this happens a couple of months before the onset of the real grammar burst.

Apart from the very first instances in both data sets there are also some later strings that can be regarded as standard formulations. The tag “sa ja” is registered another three times for Hugo (within one week, at 2;1), one of the registrations being “ja ska baan dicka, sa ja, ja ska baan dicka” [I will only drink, said I, I will only drink] (when

I have asked him to come and sit down). The string “jag ska bara” [I will only] + verb phrase is typical of everyday Swedish – perhaps above all child Swedish – when a person wishes to finish what he/she is doing instead of immediately doing what someone else wants them to do. The strange form of the adverb bara as well as the tag “sa ja” both indicate that the whole phrase has been picked up from other children. (The main clause starter jag ska bara is also found at 2;3 for Hugo. It was registered four times for Bruno between 2;9 and 3;4.) For Hugo “nu kunde ja själv” [now could I myself] ‘now I could do it by myself’ was registered both at 2;2 and 2;3. For Bruno “ja kunde” or “ja kunde, mamma” [I could, mummy] was reported at 2;2 as frequent. Both utterance types correspond to what one would say in the target language in a pragmatic situation when one has managed to do something successfully and on one’s own. For Hugo the first-person singular pronoun is found twice in Danish holophrases: “ja sauner daj, ja sauner daj” ‘I miss you’ (H 2;3), “jeg gider ikke mer” [I put.up.with not more] ‘I am tired of it’ (H 2;4).

If the complete set of utterances with the pronoun jag is considered, the impression, however, is not that holophrastic strings dominate. Apart from its presence in the formulaic strings examined here, the pronoun jag appears above all in a sentence-initial position, as a subject. This tendency is very strong for Bruno, who actually seems to anchor most of his utterances in an initial “ja”. The pronoun shows up both with various content verbs as well as functional verbs from early on, and it shows up with verbs in different morphological forms. The impression one gets from the diaries is that the two boys can apply the first-person pronoun in a wide range of linguistic contexts from 2;2 and later.

The acquisition of the first-person pronoun in the singular cannot be completely trivial, because it includes the ability to change the deictic centre of utterances – parents do not speak in the first person by assuming the child’s perspective. For Hugo there is an observation worthy of note at 2;5, i.e., when he had already been using jag correctly, as a subject pronoun, for a couple of months. According to this entry, he did not want me to say du ‘you’ to him, something that he explained with the utterance “ja e ja” ‘I am I’. Even if he had managed to acquire the deictic shift between ‘me’ and ‘you’ in his productive language, and he obviously was capable of making a meta-linguistic remark about it, he did not yet understand everything.