An enunciative proposal for the treatment of metalanguage on language acquisition

Abstract

This article proposes an enunciative view of metalanguage, based on Émile Benveniste’s theory and some theoretical shifts made in order to use this notion to explain data from language acquisition. For this purpose, the article outlines a brief overview on research about metalanguage on language acquisition, which revealed the lack of an enunciative approach to this question. After that, it was possible to develop a notion of metalanguage within Benveniste’s work. A reading of Problems of General Linguistics I and II was made in order to look for clues that allowed an inference on how the author understands this issue. It is also presented the theoretical shift made so as to understand metalanguage during the language acquisition process, based on an enunciative perspective on language acquisition. Finally, the enunciative methodology used in this study (naturalistic and longitudinal) is considered and data is analyzed in order to illustrate some of the ways that the child uses metalinguistic mechanisms in their discourse.