| Title: | Sensitivity to Situation Aspect in the Use of Tense Morphology in Child Romanian |
| Author: | Ioana Stoicescu |
| Publication: | Limba română: direcții actuale în cercetarea lingvistică. Actele celui de-al 11-lea Colocviu Internațional al Departamentului de Lingvistică, I, p. 229 |
| Editors: | Rodica Zafiu, Adina Dragomirescu, Alexandru Nicolae |
| Publisher: | Editura Universității din București |
| Place: | București |
| Year: | 2012 |
| Abstract: | The acquisition of tense and aspect in English, Polish, Dutch, Italian, and French has been the focus of considerable work by both linguists and psychologists. The following distributional pattern was noted in a variety of child languages: at early stages of development, children generally attach past/perfective inflections to telic predicates, and present/imperfective morphology to atelic predications. This observation led to the hypothesis that children do not use inflectional morphology to mark tense and grammatical aspect, but use it to mark situation aspect distinctions. This idea is known as the Aspect First Hypothesis. It is assumed that the young child (aged 2;0-6;0) is not able to make tense or grammatical aspect distinctions, but is capable of situation aspect distinctions. Two longitudinal corpora of child Romanian (2 children, aged 1;10-3;1 and 1;6-2;11) were investigated with a focus on the interaction between the prezent, perfect compus and imperfect morphologies and the lexical aspect of the predicates. The analysis confirmed the cross-linguistic observation that children use imperfective morphology predominantly on atelic predicates and perfective morphology mainly on telic predicates. The alternative account put forth in this paper is that the distributional pattern of tense inflections is a result of the speakers' efforts to build economical representations. It is more difficult to create representations for predicates whose lexical aspect, grammatical aspect and tense do not match than for predicates for which these categories are in alignment. This is why children tend to produce predicates which involve the same features (i.e. boundedness or unboundedness) at several syntactic levels. This tendency is cross-linguistic and is more marked at younger ages, when derivational capacities are less developed. |
| Language: | English |
| Links: |  pdf |
Citations to this publication: 2
| 1 | Florin Sterian | Bibliografia românească de lingvistică (BRL, 55, 2012). Lucrări de lingvistică apărute în țara noastră în cursul anului 2012 | LR, LXII (3), 271-408 | 2013 | pdf html |
| 1 | Ioana Stoicescu | Temporal deixis in early child Romanian | BWPL, XIV (1) | 2012 | pdf html |
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