Nina Hyams (UCLA) will be in residence at UConn from Wednesday to Friday of this week. She will be presenting her talk "When Tense and Aspect Compete in Child Language" on Friday, April 22, at 4:30 in Arjona Room 311.
The abstract of her talk:
A particularly robust finding concerning children’s early use of tense/ aspect morphology is that its distribution is strongly conditioned by the lexical aspect (or telicity) of the verb: past/perfective morphology is largely restricted to telic verbs while present/imperfective morphology is found most frequently on atelic verbs. Most explanations for the skewed distribution implicate the cognitive or linguistic mechanisms children use to acquire temporal morphology. Wagner (2001) refers to this idea as the ‘(lexical) aspect first hypothesis’ (AFH), as follows: children initially use tense and grammatical aspect morphology to mark lexical aspect. However, Hyams (2007) shows that the temporal meanings of RIs and other non-finite root forms (in typologically distinct languages) are also contingent on aspect. For example, in early English bare (non-finite) telic predicates tend to denote past events and atelic bare verbs have present reference. Thus, the ‘aspect first’ distribution cannot simply be an effect of the (mis-)mapping of tense/aspect morphology, but is instead related to the event structure of the verb. In this talk I will suggest that during the RI stage the assignment of temporal reference in finite clauses involves a competition between tense anchoring (as in adult grammar) and aspectual anchoring, the later being the mechanism used by children to assign temporal reference to RIs and other non-finite clause (Hyams 2007). This ‘competing anchors model (CAH)’ is an extension of the Hyams’ 2007 ‘aspectual anchoring hypothesis’. In addition to capturing the parallel behavior of finite and non-finite clauses that children produce, the CAH provides an explanation for several (otherwise) puzzling findings concerning their (mis-)comprehension of various temporal structures.
