Aquisição verbal em dados de criança do português brasileiro

Abstract

The research aims to understand verbal acquisition and possible verbal inflections in data from a native Brazilian Portuguese speaker, born in Maceió/AL, aged 2.11 (two years and eleven months) to 3.3 (three years and three months). The data were collected between 2005 and 2006. The guiding question of the research is: How can children acquire verbs in such a short time of life and apply them, for the most part, correctly? To answer this question, we used Generative Theory (Chomsky, 1986). According to Chomsky, language is considered a mental object, a system of principles inherent to the human mind. The methodology used is longitudinal descriptive using the CHILDES3 system (Child Language Data Exchange System), developed by Bian MacWhinney in 2000, a computer program that allows the decoding and transcription of children's linguistic data. Twenty-one sentences from sessions 1, 2, 4, and 5 were analyzed. The results obtained showed that Gabriel frequently used verbs in the infinitive form, such as “to catch,” “to wash,” “to sing,” and “to sleep,” expressing actions in general without specifying time, person, or number; and some verbs in the gerund, such as “to sleep,” “to play,” “to eat,” and “to call,” indicating an action in progress without assigning a specific time to it. The generative theory, proposed by Noam Chomsky, approaches language acquisition as an innate process governed by universal principles that are present in children’s cognitive structure. According to this theory, children have an innate ability to acquire language quickly and efficiently. According to the generative perspective, the acquisition of verbs and other linguistic structures occurs through the application of grammatical rules and principles that are inherent to the linguistic system. Children have a predisposition to internalize these rules and use them in the production and comprehension of language.