O lugar da holófrase nos estudos de aquisição da linguagem

This article revisits the concept of holophrase (the use of a single word to express a complex idea) in early child language and argues that the founding questions posited by the study of oneor single-word utterances are still challenging in the field of Language Acquisition. Holophrases generally imply previous syntactic, semantic or pragmatic knowledge projected onto single-word utterances. Some core issues stemmed from approaches of holophrase and single-word utterance at the onset of child speech still exhibit some loose ends and are still open questions. Some such issues are: pre-verbal knowledge of language as opposed to language development after the production of early words; the relationship between preverbal perception and linguistic production; what is innate and what is acquired in acquisition, single-words and bootstrapping. An alternative view to previous syntactic and semantic knowledge is presented by de Lemos and a prosodic view of the early fragmented utterance on the speech of the child is discussed here.