ABSTRACT
One hundred years after the publication of the Cours de Linguistique Générale, its importance reaches our days enhanced by interest in the discovery of new documents. In Saussure’s lessons, the phenomenon of analogy is exemplified by children’s speech, an illustration that surpasses mere pedagogical purposes and, at the service of theorization, offers a point of departure that is able to evoke other pillars of the Saussurean conceptual edifice (language and speech, the associative-syntagmatic mechanism, to say the least). In this work, we accept Saussure’s invitation to “listen to a child”, exploring, through the available empirical evidence, innovations which make us “toucher du doigt le jeu du mécanisme linguistique” - an image suggestive of theoretical and empirical questions capable of attesting the up-to-dateness of the foundations of Saussurean thought in the studies on child speech.
Key-words:
language´s mechanism; analogy; mise en rapport; mise en système; associative relations; structural forgetfulness