Sonia Rocca

Child second language acquisition of temporality

This paper shows the role of aspect in child SLA of temporality. The notion of temporality is restricted here to explicit morphological encoding of tense and aspect with past reference. There are two types of aspect: grammatical aspect and lexical aspect. The former refers to aspectual distinctions that are explicitly marked by linguistic categories, usually auxiliaries and inflections (i.e. the progressive in English); while the latter refers to the semantic features of the lexical items that describe the situation (i.e. fall is inherently telic). Studies of L1 and L2 acquisition have indicated that learners interpret verb morphology as marking lexical aspect rather than past tense in itself: that is, in early stages of language acquisition verb morphology tends to encode inherent aspectual distinctions, not tense or grammatical aspect. According to the aspect hypothesis, progressive marking is strongly related to durative predicates, while past morphology is strongly related to telic predicates. The developmental route starts with verbs in the base form (Vo), then the progressive (Ving) emerges with durative predicates, and finally the past tense (Ven/Ved) emerges with telic predicates. In a longitudinal study of three Italian L1 children learning ESL, the data collected so far seem to support the aspect hypothesis and the acquisitional patterns described above.

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