Залогови значения в ранните детски изказвания и абстрактното понятие ‘субект’ на изречението
Reflexive, passive, and impersonal forms in young children’s utterances, and the Abstract notion of syntactic subject

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses one of the important issues of the developmental psycholinguistics: to what extent are young children’s utterances syntactically based or are they semantically motivated. Some researchers claim that children start with semantic representations, which are later replaced by syntactic ones. If children’s early utterances are semantically based, then the syntactic subject should always have the semantic function of agent. The analysis of voice structures in the utterances of children (aged 1;6 to 3;0) acquiring Bulgarian, reveals the production of reflexive, passive and impersonal constructions. Hence, we can suppose that Bulgarian children before the age of 3;0, associate the syntactic subject with different semantic roles (e.g. agent, patient, experiencer, etc.), i.e. we can credit children’s linguistic competence with the abstract syntactic notion of subject. The early appearance of reflexive, passive and impersonal predicates in the speech of young Bulgarian children can be due to the language specific overt marking of voice in Bulgarian (as one of the Slavic languages).

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