The acquisition of tense—aspect in child second language English

Abstract

The aim of this article is two-fold: to test the Aspect Hypothesis, according to which the early use of tense—aspect morphology patterns by semantic/aspectual features of verbs, and Tense is initially defective (e.g. Antinucci and Miller, 1976; Bloom et al., 1980; Andersen and Shirai, 1994; 1996; Robison, 1995; Shirai and Andersen, 1995; Bardovi-Harlig, 1998; Shirai, 1998); and to test Gavruseva's aspectual features account, according to which inherent aspectual properties of the verbs such as telicity and punctuality determine which verbs will be non-finite and which verbs will not (Gavruseva, 2002; 2003; 2004) in child L2 acquisition. Based on longitudinal data from a Turkish child second language (L2) learner of English, we present counter evidence for both hypotheses. First, it is shown that despite the fact that the early production of past tense morphology occurs exclusively with punctual predicates, data from copula be, auxiliary do and pronominal subjects do not show any evidence for defective tense. Second, contrary to what is predicted in Gavruseva's hypothesis, the rate of uninflected punctual verbs is much higher than that of uninflected non-punctual verbs in the child L2 grammar.