Journal article
Is there primacy of aspect in child L2 English?
Bilingualism (Cambridge, England), Vol.5(2), pp.109-130
08/2002
DOI: 10.1017/S1366728902000226
Abstract
This article investigates whether the Aspect-before-Tense Hypothesis (Antinucci and Miller, 1976; Shirai and Andersen, 1995) accounts for the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in child L2 English. The main question addressed is whether early uses of tense-aspect inflections can be analyzed as a spell-out of semantic/aspectual features of verbs (such as punctuality, telicity, durativity, etc.). The data are drawn from a detailed longitudinal study of an eight-year-old Russian-speaking child who was acquiring English as L2 in the USA. It is first shown that the emergence of tense-aspect morphology patterns by aspectual verb class. However, contrary to the Aspect-before-Tense Hypothesis, it is argued that the acquisition patterns cannot be attributed to “defective” tense, nor do they reflect the spell-out of aspectual features. A new approach to the data is developed that proposes underspecification of the syntactic aspectual head in early L2 child grammar.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Is there primacy of aspect in child L2 English?
- Creators
- Elena Gavruseva - University of Iowa
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Bilingualism (Cambridge, England), Vol.5(2), pp.109-130
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press
- DOI
- 10.1017/S1366728902000226
- ISSN
- 1366-7289
- eISSN
- 1469-1841
- Number of pages
- 22
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 08/2002
- Academic Unit
- Linguistics
- Record Identifier
- 9984222810802771
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