Children’s speech from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics:

an investigation into the productivity of the concepts of recursion and blending in understanding linguistic phenomena in children

Abstract

This essay is the result of an investigation that wants to understand the productivity of theories from Cognitive Linguistics, in particular, Construction Grammar, as well as reflections arising from the Enunciation Theory and Discourse Analysis for the analysis of children´s speech. To this end, recursion and blending were analyzed in particular to shed light on some children’s speeches taken from the “Frases de Crianças” page, undertaking an analysis that investigated the cognitive and linguistic-social complexity of the linguistic phenomena presented by them. The study therefore sought to understand how the observance of the performance of general cognitive principles manifested linguistically as well as other cognitive abilities – such as memory and recursion – is a fruitful field for the analysis of linguistic occurrences in children.