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Root infinitives in child second language English: an aspectual features account
Journal article   Peer reviewed

Root infinitives in child second language English: an aspectual features account

Elena Gavruseva
Second language research, Vol.20(4), pp.335-371
10/2004
DOI: 10.1191/0267658304sr244oa
url
https://hal.science/hal-00572076View
Open Access

Abstract

This article examines the emergence of finiteness in early second language (L2) English of five consecutive bilinguals (ages 6 to 9). The departure point is Gavruseva’s (2002; 2003) proposal that nonfinite root predicates result from the underspecification of syntactic aspectual heads at the initial state S0. Gavruseva’s ‘underspecification of AspP’ account is developed further by examining the feature contents of aspectual projections in English from a crosslinguistic perspective. It is argued that English, in contrast to Russian and French, lacks the genuine imperfective and perfective morphemes and so makes use of a greater variety of aspectual features (e.g., intrinsic and compositional telicity features, inter alia). It is also proposed that an English verb’s telicity semantics defines its aspectual class and predicts its finiteness status in children’s early grammar. An advantage of the ‘aspectual features account’ is that it explains why statives (inherent atelics) and punctual eventives (inherent telics) show much higher finiteness rates than nonpunctual eventives (an aspectual class defined by a compositional telicity feature) in the child L2 data. Other approaches to the root infinitive phenomenon such as the Truncation Hypothesis (Rizzi 1993=94) and the Morphological Deficit Hypothesis (Haznedar and Schwartz, 1997; Lardiere, 1998; Prévost and White, 2000) cannot explain these finiteness patterns.

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