The temporal interpretation of Dutch children's root infinitivals: the effect of eventivity

This study concerns the presence and status of Tense in young children's nonfinite main clauses, or root infinitivals (RIs). Verb- containing utterances produced by four Dutch-speaking boys (age range 1;9-3;2) were classified along the following dimensions: finite-infinitive; temporal reference, as indicated by linguistic and non-linguistic context; and type of verb - eventive vs. non- eventive. The data show that (a) the proportion of non-eventive verbs in RIs is close to zero, whereas they make up approximately half of the finite predicates, and (b) RIs are used to refer to present, past as well as (predominantly) future eventualities, while the temporal reference of finite sentences is restricted to 'present'. It is argued that these findings support the assumption that RIs do not contain Tense, and that their temporal reference comes about as a result of the contextual interpretation of an event variable, if available. The results of a pilot experiment suggest that the pattern in production is mirrored in comprehension.

[1]  L. Rizzi.  Early null subjects and root null subjects , 1994 .

[2]  J.K.S. van Ginneken.  De roman van een kleuter , 2022 .

[3]  L. Haegeman.  Root Infinitives, Tense, and Truncated Structures in Dutch , 1995 .

[4]  J. Hurford.  The Emergence of Syntax , 2000 .

[5]  A. M. Schaerlaekens,et al.  The two-word sentence in child language development : a study based on evidence provided by Dutch-speaking triplets , 1973 .

[6]  Henk J. Verkuyl,et al.  On the Compositional Nature of the Aspects , 1972 .

[7]  Kenneth Wexler,et al.  The development of inflection in a biologically based theory of language acquisition. , 1996 .

[8]  M. Bowerman,et al.  Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns , 1991, Cognition.

[9]  C. Foley,et al.  The development of functional categories : The acquisition of the subject in French , 1998 .

[10]  D. Bickerton.  The language bioprogram hypothesis , 1984, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[11]  K. Wexler,et al.  The Optional-Infinitive Stage in Child English: Evidence from Negation , 1996 .

[12]  Eve V. Clark,et al.  The principle of contrast: A constraint on language acquisition. , 1987 .

[13]  G. Bol.  Implicational scaling in child language acquisition: the order of production of Dutch verb constructions. , 1995 .

[14]  Angelika Kratzer,et al.  Stage-Level and Individual-Level Predicates , 1995 .

[15]  H. Gaifman,et al.  Symbolic Logic , 1881, Nature.

[16]  Frank Wijnen.  Incremental acquisition of phrase structure. , 1995 .

[17]  P. Jordens.  The acquisition of verb placement in Dutch and German , 1990 .

[18]  D. Ingram,et al.  Early syntactic acquisition in German: Evidence for the modal hypothesis , 1996 .

[19]  D. Poeppel,et al.  The full competence hypothesis of clause structure in early German , 1993 .

[20]  E. Rosch.  ON THE INTERNAL STRUCTURE OF PERCEPTUAL AND SEMANTIC CATEGORIES1 , 1973 .

[21]  Nina Hyams,et al.  Missing heads in child language , 1996 .

[22]  R. Brown,et al.  A First Language , 1973 .

[23]  Uriel Weinreich,et al.  On semantics , 1980 .

[24]  Elizabeth Thompson,et al.  Look... and See , 1973 .

[25]  K. Wexler,et al.  Verb movement: Finiteness and head movement in early child grammars , 1994 .

[26]  B. D. Schwartz,et al.  Language Acquisition Studies in Generative Grammar , 1994 .

[27]  F. Moore.  Cognitive development and the acquisition of language , 1973 .

[28]  B. MacWhinney,et al.  The Child Language Data Exchange System: an update , 1990, Journal of Child Language.

[29]  A. Pierce.  On the emergence of syntax : a crosslinguistic study , 1989 .

[30]  Kenneth Wexler.  Optional infinitives, head movement and the economy of derivation in child grammar , 1992 .