Филологический класс (Apr 2022)
Real Everyday Grammar of Children’s Speech: A Corpus Study
Abstract
The article discusses the possibilities of creating a corpus of children’s speech and the use of corpus research in ontolinguistics. The corpus of texts is defined by the author as a tool for quantitative linguistic research, which presupposes a stepwise solution of a number of problems: 1. Selection of the material that most fully and rationally represents the linguistic phenomenon. 2. Estimation of the required volume of texts. 3. Creation of a system of markup – a tool that distinguishes the corpus from a collection of texts, diaries and dictionaries. 4. Post-processing and creation of the corpus in electronic form. The expansion of corpus research leads to the emergence of children’s speech corpora: CHILDES, INFANT.RU, CHILD.RU, Emo.Child.Ru, StartWrit. The article demonstrates the difficulties of compiling corpora of children’s speech associated with its dynamism, variability, individuality of children’s speech strategies, and abundance of neologisms. An electronic corpus of children’s speech with grammatical markup was compiled on the basis of the publication “Corpus of Children’s Utterances” by V. K. Kharchenko. The corpus was created using the AntConcprogram and the MyStem morphological markup program. The creation of the corpus included the following stages: 1. Transfer of the material into electronic format. 2. Data processing. 3. Automatic grammatical markup. 4. Post-processing. 5. Presentation of the material in the form convenient for further study. The project of a grammatical corpus of children’s speech presented in this study is considered as a tool for modeling the process of acquisition and use of the basic, initial grammatical categories. Some grammatical patterns, singled out with the help of the corpus, can make it possible to create tools for studying the grammatical component of the child’s linguistic competencies, and specifically for revealing the real everyday grammar of the child’s linguistic personality. The real everyday grammar itself – a set of grammatical forms on the basis of which the speaker constructs their speech – can become a stepping stone for creating new methods of teaching Russian grammar, especially when teaching Russian as a second language.
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