The Acquisition of the Present [1 ed.] 9789027268075, 9789027212269

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The Acquisition of the Present

Edited by Dalila Ayoun

John Benjamins Publishing Company

The Acquisition of the Present

The Acquisition of the Present Edited by

Dalila Ayoun University of Arizona, Tuscon

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdam / Philadelphia

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TM

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

doi 10.1075/z.196 Cataloging-in-Publication Data available from Library of Congress: lccn 2015026583 (print) / 2015030176 (e-book) isbn 978 90 272 1226 9 (Hb) isbn 978 90 272 6807 5 (e-book) © 2015 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa

Table of contents Preface Acknowledgments About the contributors and editor chapter 1 The development of third person singular present form -s: Verb semantics or input frequency? Jing Wang & Yasuhiro Shirai chapter 2 Zero-present under past in child French: Evidence from the future Oana Lungu & Hamida Demirdache chapter 3 The L2 acquisition of the English present simple – present progressive distinction: Verb-raising revisited Sarah Ann Liszka chapter 4 There is no time like the present: A longitudinal case study in the L2 acquisition of French Dalila Ayoun chapter 5 Examining the influence of transfer and prototypes on the acquisition of the present progressive in L2 Spanish Alison Gabriele, José Alemán Bañón, Beatriz López Prego & Alonso Canales chapter 6 Formation and function of the simple present in conversational L2 Russian Wendy M. Whitehead Martelle chapter 7 L2 acquisition of English aspect by L1 Arabic speakers: The role of interpretable features at the syntax-semantics interface Kholoud A. Al-Thubaiti

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chapter 8 The L2 acquisition of the present in the Japanese tense-aspect system: Evidence for a tripartite system? Noriyasu Haradi Li & Yasuhiro Shirai chapter 9 Present tense as a neutral form in the L2 French of Chinese L1 speakers Claire Saillard chapter 10 The simple present and the expression of temporality in L1 English and L2 English oral narratives: When form meets discourse Alexandra Vraciu

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chapter 11 Conclusions and directions for future research Dalila Ayoun

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Subject Index

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Name Index

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Preface “Le présent serait plein de tous les avenirs, si le passé n’y projetait déjà une histoire”.  André Gide

The study of tense, aspect and mood/modality (TAM) has been a very productive area of research from a variety of theoretical and applied perspectives because, as noted elsewhere (e.g. Saussure, Moeschler & Puskás 2009), it is relevant to syntax, morphology, semantics, discourse/pragmatics, as well as the integration of information across the interfaces formed by each one of these domains (e.g. Chomsky 2007; Sorace 2011). The investigation of TAM systems is thus a particularly interesting and fruitful area for both theoretical and applied linguists. However, the majority of empirical studies so far have focused on past temporality (e.g. Ayoun 2005, 2013; Granda 2004; Salaberry 2008), neglecting the acquisition of the expression of other temporal references such as the present or the future with a few exceptions for the future (e.g. Ayoun 2014; Bardovi-Harlig 2005, 2015; Benati 2001; Howard 2012; Salsbury 2000; Wiberg 2002) and the present (e.g. Canales Viquez 2010; Gabriele & Canale 2011; Lim 2003; Snape, Matthews, M. Hirakawa, Y. Hirakawa & Hosoi 2014), leaving unanswered the question of how its investigation may contribute to our understanding of the acquisition of TAM systems in general. The purpose of this edited volume is to start addressing this question by testing semantic and syntactic hypotheses with a few studies in first (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition from a variety of theoretical perspectives and L1-L2 language pairs. It is unclear why there is such a paucity of empirical studies focusing on the present (tense, temporality and/or aspect), although it may be because its description and acquisition are assumed to be straightforward particularly compared to the well known intricacies and difficulties of the past tense, temporality and aspect. However, that is far from being the case as a brief crosslinguistic overview illustrates. The term ‘present’ refers both to a temporality and to a tense; as the latter, it can be a simple present or a present progressive whether that distinction is grammaticalized (e.g. Spanish, Portuguese, English) or not (e.g. French, Russian), and it can be combined with past temporality (e.g. present perfect in English). The present may be characterized as non-past allowing any reading that occurs after speech time (­Binnick 1991; McClure 2008), but it can also express an event that took place in the past (i.e. historic present in Russian, English or French), or will take place in the future. It may be a default tense form as in Japanese (Ogihara 1996), or be used only in s­pecific

 Preface

c­ontexts. Some languages, such as French, establish an aspectual distinction (i.e. ­indicative present vs subjunctive present), even if that distinction is not consistently marked morphologically as in French that often conflates tense and aspect. Moroever, the distinction between the present and past subjunctive in French is atemporal in that it does not necessarily refer to a past event. In Spanish, the present progressive can have both habitual and futurate readings, whereas in Arabic it has progressive and habitual readings (Al-Thubaiti this volume). Finally, the present tense is not grammaticalized in a language like Chinese that uses lexical means such as temporal adverbs instead (Lin 2003). This brief, and non-exhaustive, overview is sufficient to hint at the learnability difficulties L2 (and maybe also L1) language learners may encounter. The objective of the present volume is to contribute to the already impressive body of research in TAM from a variety of theoretical perspectives by delving into the L1 and L2 acquisition of the present. The first two chapters focus on the L1 acquisition of English with the analysis of longitudinal data from the perspective of the Aspect hypothesis and the Verb-Island hypothesis (Wang & Shirai), and the L1 acquisition of French from the perspective of the zero-tense hypothesis (Demirdache & Lungu). The remaining chapters tackle the L2 acquisition of English (Liszka, Al-Thubaiti, Vraciu), French (Ayoun, Saillard), Spanish (Gabriele et al.), Russian (Martelle) and Japanese (Li & Shirai) with different L1 backgrounds (French, English, Arabic, Chinese and Korean) testing various semantic and syntactic hypotheses. The last chapter summarizes the findings of these studies, and offers a few conclusions and directions for future research.

References Ayoun, D. 2014. The acquisition of future temporality by L2 French learners. Journal of French Language Studies 24:181–202. DOI: 10.1017/S0959269513000185 Ayoun, D. 2013. The Second Language Acquisition of French Tense, Mood, Modality and Aspect [AILA Applied Linguistics Series 10]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/aals.10 Ayoun, D. 2005. The acquisition of tense and aspect in L2 French from a Universal Grammar perspective. In Tense and Aspect in Romance Languages: Theoretical and Applied Perspectives, D. Ayoun & R. Salaberry (eds), 79–127. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bardovi-Harlig, K. 2015. The development of L2 English future: Adverbials, temporal distance and clause types as variables in functional accounts. Talk given at the AAAL Annual Conference, Toronto, March 21–24. Bardovi-Harlig, K. 2005. The future of desire: Lexical futures and modality in L2 English future expression. In Proceedings of the 7th Generative Approaches to Second Language Acquisition Conference, L. Dekydtspotter & R. Sprouse (eds), 1–12. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. Benati, A. 2001. A comparative study of the effects of processing instruction and output-based instruction on the acquisition of the Italian future tense. Language Teaching Research 5:95–127.

Preface  Binnick, R. 1991. Time and the Verb. Oxford: OUP. Canales Viquez, A. 2010. Acquisition of Tense-aspect Morphology in English by Native Speakers of Costa Rican Spanish: The Case of Simple Present and Present Progressive. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas. Chomsky, N. 2007. Of minds and language. Biolinguistics 1:9–27. Gabriele, A. & Canales, A. 2011. No time like the present: Examining transfer at the interfaces in second language acquisition. Lingua 121:670–687. DOI: 10.1016/j.lingua.2010.07.010 Granda, B. 2004. La expresión de la temporalidad en textos narrativos en español como segunda lengua por anglohablantes. Centro de Enseñanza para Extranjeros. Mexico, DF, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Howard, M. 2012. From tense and aspect to modality: The acquisition of future, conditional and subjunctive morphology in L2 French. A preliminary study. Cahiers Chronos 24:201–223. Lim, J. 2003. Interference in the second language acquisition of the present simple tense. Asian Journal of English Language Teaching 13:1–28. Lin, J-w. 2003. Temporal reference in Mandarin Chinese. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 12(3):259–311. DOI: 10.1023/A:1023665301095 McClure, W. 2008. On the morpho-semantics of the progressive. In Proceedings of the 25th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, D. Baumer, D. Montero & M. Scanlon (eds), ­384–392. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press. Ogihara, T. 1996. Tense, Attitudes and Scope. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI: 10.1007/978-94-015-8609-2 Salaberry, R. 2008. Marking Past Tense in Second Language Acquisition. London: Continuum Press. Salsbury, T. 2000. The Grammaticalization of Unreal Conditionals: A Longitudinal Study of L2 English. Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, Bloomington. Saussure de, L., Moeschler, J. & Puskás, G. (eds). 2009. Recent Advances in the Syntax and Semantics of Tense, Aspect and Modality. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sorace, A. 2011. Pinning down the concept of ‘interface’ in bilingualism. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 1:1–33. DOI: 10.1075/lab.1.1.01sor Snape, N., Matthews, J., Hirakawa, M., Hirakawa, Y. & Hosoi, H. 2014. Aspect in L2 English. A longitudinal study of four Japanese child returnees. EUROSLA Yearbook 14:79–110. DOI: 10.1075/eurosla.14.04sna Wiberg, E. 2002. Information structure in dialogic future plans: A study of Italian native speakers and Swedish preadvanced and advanced learners of Italian. In Tense-Aspect Morphology in L2 Acquisition [Language Acquisition and Language Disorders 27], M.R. Salaberry & Y. Shirai (eds), 285–321. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI: 10.1075/lald.27.13wib

Acknowledgments My most sincere thanks and appreciation go to my colleagues Alex Cuza, Mary Erbaugh, Kim Geeslin, Pedro Guijarro, Cornelia Hamann, Roger Hawkins, Keiko Kaku, Tanja Kupisch, Ron Leow, Antxon Olarrea, Teresa Parodi, Tyler Peterson, Julian Pine, Rafael Salaberry, Montserrat Sanz, Heather Smyser, Natsue Sugaya, Jili Sun, Anna Theakston, Anita Thomas, who served as anonymous external reviewers. Their time, expertise and insightful comments and suggestions were greatly appreciated. Working with Kees Vaes and the entire staff at John Benjamins was a pleasure, as always.

About the contributors and editor Kholoud A. Al-Thubaiti is Assistant Professor of Applied Linguistics in the Department of English Language at Umm Al-Qura University in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Her research focuses on the second language acquisition of morpho-syntax and semantics from a generative perspective, such as the development of tense, aspect, resumptive pronouns, verb phrase ellipsis, and verb-raising effects. At the core of her research agenda is testing the long-term effects of age of onset on L2 acquisition both in instructed and naturalistic environments. She is currently examining the ultimate grammars of (very) young L2 starters at the morpho-syntactic level. Her most recent publication is a chapter entitled, “Age of L2 learning makes no difference in instructed settings: input matters most” (Routledge & TIRF, 2014). She may be reached at ­[email protected]. Dalila Ayoun is Professor of French Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition and Teaching in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Arizona in Tucson. Her research focuses on the second language acquisition of morpho-syntax from a generative perspective, such as the development of tense, aspect, mood/modality as well as grammatical gender. Her most recent publications include a monograph, The Second Language Acquisition of French Tense, Aspect, Mood and Modality (John Benjamins, 2013), two edited volumes on French applied linguistics (John Benjamins, 2007, 2008) and various articles such as ‘The acquisition of future temporality by L2 French learners’ (2014). She co-edits the Studies in Bilingualism book series published by John Benjamins with Leah Roberts (University of York) and is a handling editor for the Journal of French Language Studies. She may be reached at [email protected]. José Alemán Bañón is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Reading and will take up a new postdoctoral position at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain, and Language in August 2015. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 2012. His research focuses on the processing of morphosyntax by native and nonnative speakers using electrophysiological techniques such as EEG. His recent publications include articles in Second Language Research, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, and Brain Research. He may be reached at [email protected]. Alonso Canales is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the ­University of Costa Rica. His research focuses on second language acquisition and processing in adult learners of English. His 2012 doctoral dissertation from the University of K ­ ansas examined wh-dependencies in Spanish-speaking learners of English.

 About the contributors and editor

His recent publications include an article in the journal Lingua. He may be reached at [email protected]. Hamida Demirdache is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nantes and head of the Nantes Linguistics Lab (LLING). Her research lies at the syntax, semantics and first language acquisition interface. She has worked on topics such as anaphora, tense in its interaction with modals and aspect, the syntax and semantics of questions in French child language and across languages. Recent representative publications include ‘Arguments for LD movement in LD questions in child language’ (in Diagnosing Syntax. Oxford) or ‘Aspect & Temporal Anaphora’ (NLLT). She is currently the leader of a work program experimentally investigating heritage language knowledge and acquisition as opposed to both native and second language, for the European cooperation program ATheME (Advancing the European Multilingual Experience). She may be reached at hamida.demirdache@univ-nantes. Alison Gabriele is Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Her research, which has been funded by the National Science Foundation, focuses on the acquisition and processing of syntax and semantics by adult second language learners, focusing on the cognitive and linguistic factors that impact development and ultimate attainment. Her most recent publications include articles in Second Language Research, Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, Brain Research, Lingua, and Language Acquisition as well as book chapters in volumes published Mouton de Gruyter and John Benjamins. She is an Associate Editor for the journal Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. She may be reached at [email protected]. Noriyasu Harada Li is a doctoral student of Applied Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh. He is also in the TESOL and Asian Studies certificate programs. His research focuses on the moraic theory, the influence of syllable structures on L2 production, and the syntactic properties and functions of the Japanese reflexive zibun. He may be reached at [email protected]. Sarah Liszka is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Language Acquisition in the Department of Literature, Language & Theatre at the University of Greenwich where she is also a member of the Centre for Applied Research and Outreach in Language Education (CAROLE). Her research investigates the role of the first language in (morpho)syntactic and semantic development, the linguistic-pragmatic interface, whether or not a ‘critical period’ exists and the nature of ultimate attainment in second language acquisition. Her work to-date has focused on the acquisition of the English temporal system, including the simple past, the present perfect and the present progressive. She has published articles on this theme as sole author and as a co-author with Roger Hawkins (University of Essex), and Leah Roberts (University of York). She is also a member of the Editorial Boards for the Eurosla Yearbook (John Benjamins)



About the contributors and editor 

and the International Review for Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (Mouton de Gruyter). She can be reached at [email protected]. Oana Lungu is currently Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Centro de Linguística da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal), and associate member of the Laboratoire de Linguistique de Nantes (France). She received her Ph.D. from the University of Nantes in 2012, with a thesis on the syntax/semantics of tense in embedded contexts in French child language. Her work focuses on the syntax/semantics interface in language acquisition and language processing including topics such as tense, relative clauses, quantifiers, disjunction under negation. She may be reached at [email protected]. Wendy M. Whitehead Martelle is Term Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Linguistics Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Her research interests include the L2 acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in Russian, and the effect of pedagogy and individual differences in second language acquisition. She may be reached at [email protected]. Beatriz López Prego is a doctoral student at the University of Kansas. Her research focuses on the acquistion and processing of agreement by native and nonnative speakers of Spanish. Her recent publications include articles in Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism and the proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development. She may be reached at [email protected]. Claire Saillard is Professor of Linguistics at Université Paris Diderot (France) and attached to the Centre National pour la Recherche Scientifique (UMR 7110 Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle). Her research interests include Chinese linguistics, Austronesian Linguistics, multilingualism and contact linguistics, as well as acquisition of L2 French by Mandarin Chinese speakers. Her recent publications include articles on temporality in Mandarin Chinese (2011, 2012). She may be reached at claire. [email protected]. Yasuhiro Shirai is Professor of Applied Linguistics, Eirik Borve Professor in Modern Languages, and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Case Western Reserve University. His research interests include first and second language acquisition of grammatical constructions, in particular of tense-aspect morphology, and cognitive models of language acquisition and processing. His publications appeared in Applied Psycholinguistics, First Language, Journal of Child Language, Journal of Pragmatics, Language, Language Learning, Linguistics, Memory & Cognition, Second Language Research, Studies in Language, Studies in Second Language Acquisition, among others. He has (co-)authored and (co-)edited more than ten books/special issues of journals, including Handbook of East Asian Linguistics: Japanese (Cambridge University Press). He is co-editor of Studies in Language Sciences, an associate editor

 About the contributors and editor

of First Language, and serves on several editorial boards, including Studies in Second Language Acquisition, IRAL, and Journal of Cognitive Science. He may be reached at [email protected]. Alexandra Vraciu is a Lecturer in English Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (Spain). Her research focuses on the characteristics of the advanced learner variety in English, in particular the development of the tense-aspect morphology. She is also interested in the interface between classroom instruction and language learning in foreign language contexts. Her recent publications include “Exploring the upper limits of the Aspect Hypothesis: Tense-aspect morphology in the advanced English L2 variety” in Language, Interaction, Acquisition (2013, John Benjamins) as well as the chapter “Verbal morphology in advanced varieties of English L2: aspect or discourse hypothesis?” in collective volumes such as Comparative Perspectives on Language Acquisition: A Tribute to Clive Perdue (2012, Multilingual Matters). She may be contacted at [email protected]. Jing Wang received her Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh in 2014. She will be Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Languages & Literatures at the University of Denver in the Fall 2015. Her research focuses on second language acquisition and teaching, particularly on connecting linguistic theories with language learning and teaching such as how linguistics research can facilitate teaching and how second language learning and teaching can verify different theories. She may be reached at [email protected].

chapter 1

The development of third person singular present form -s Verb semantics or input frequency?* Jing Wang & Yasuhiro Shirai

University of Denver / Case Western Reserve University Addressing two hypotheses, the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai 1994; Shirai & Andersen 1995) and the Verb-Island Hypothesis (Tomasello 1992), this study analyzed whether the acquisition of third person singular present -s (3S) follows the same path as other tense-aspect markers, such as -ing, past, whose acquisition is influenced by the verb semantic properties, or its acquisition is affected more by input frequency. The present study analyzed three children’s longitudinal data from CHILDES database (MacWhinney 2000) and investigated the developmental characteristics of 3S from three perspectives: the percentage of 3S co-occurring with stative verbs, the frequency correlation of mother’s input and child’s production, and the data comparison with the past tense marker. The results show that the children’s acquisition of semantically motivated morphemes, (i.e. past tense), was more affected by verb semantic properties than input frequency, supporting the Aspect Hypothesis. However, the acquisition of formally motivated features (i.e. 3S), was more affected by input frequency, supporting the Verb-Island Hypothesis.

1.  Introduction A major influence on the first language acquisition (L1) of verbal inflections has been shown to be verb semantics (Bloom, Lifter & Hafitz 1980; Stoll 1998; Li & Shirai 2000).

*  The study reported in this chapter was presented at GURT 2012, Georgetown U ­ niversity, March 8–11. We thank the audience for their feedback. We also thank Alan Juffs, Helen Stickney and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this chapter.

doi 10.1075/z.196.01wan © 2015 John Benjamins Publishing Company

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Furthermore, an interesting interaction has been consistently observed between inherent verb meanings and tense-aspect markers in language acquisition. Namely, children first use progressive markers (e.g. English -ing and Chinese zai) with verbs that name durative and dynamic situations, but use past tense or perfective markers (e.g. English past tense and Chinese le) with change of state verbs (Li & Shirai 2000), which are considered the main components of the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai 1994; Shirai & Andersen 1995). Although much research has been done on the semantic properties of the development of inflectional morphology for past tense and imperfective aspect markers (e.g. Weist, Wysocka, Witkowska-Stadnik, Buczowska & Konieczna 1984; Behrens 1993; Li & ­Shirai 2000; Shirai & Andersen 1995; Shirai 1994, 1998), few studies have focused on the development of third person singular present inflection (3S) in English (e.g. Theakston, Lieven & Tomasello 2003; Li & Shirai 2000; Shirai 1991). In the present study, we use children’s spoken data from the CHILDES (Child Language Data Exchange System) database (MacWhinney 2000) to investigate the developmental characteristics of 3S. The inflection of 3S is a number and person agreement marker that also refers to the present tense, which mainly expresses habitual and stative situations. The extension of the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai 1994; Shirai & Andersen 1995) predicts that 3S should be associated with some verbs with certain semantic properties in children’s learning, such as statives (e.g. Shirai 1991). However, according to the Verb-Island Hypothesis (Tomasello 1992: 257), verbs operate as “individual islands of organization”, and children’s early verbs develop along different paths, following a word-by-word acquisition process; it is further assumed that each develops its own mini-syntax independently of other verbs during learning. Tomasello’s Verb-Island Hypothesis claims that children are conservative learners and that simple patterns are learned by imitation, which implies that input frequency should be an important factor in the early learning process (Moerk 1980; Ambridge, Kidd, Rowland & Theakston 2015). The Verb-Island Hypothesis predicts that specific verb frequency rather than verb semantic properties should decide the early learning of 3S. Based on these two hypotheses, the research question of the present study is whether the data support the Aspect Hypothesis that is whether 3S shows a different tendency combining with different types of verbs, or whether it supports the Verb-Island Hypothesis in which input frequency determines the early learning. To this end, we analyze the same data sets for the past tense marker and 3S using the same methodology, to compare how the development of 3s differs from that of past tense marker whose acquisitional pattern is fairly well understood (Weist et al. 1984; Weist 2002; Behrens 1993; Shirai 1991, 1998; Li & Shirai 2000). The chapter consists of 6 sections. Section 2 clarifies some notions concerning tense and aspect, especially the inherent lexical aspect and reviews two major hypotheses tested in this chapter. Section 3 reviews the literature in the acquisition of 3S in L1 acquisition. Section 4 describes the method of the study and data analysis and then



Chapter 1.  The development of third person singular present form -s

presents and discusses the results of the study. Section 5 discusses and summarizes the implications of the study for morpheme studies and language acquisition studies in general. Section 6 concludes the chapter.

2.  The Aspect Hypothesis vs. the Verb-Island Hypothesis 2.1  The Aspect Hypothesis 2.1.1  Grammatical aspect vs. inherent lexical aspect Both tense and aspect are terms that refer to the notion of temporality. Tense is understood as the location of an event or state on a time axis relative to some other time (such as the time of utterance) (Comrie 1985). For example, the difference between ‘he is reading’ and ‘he was reading’ is that of tense, because the contrast of ‘is’ and ‘was’ signifies the difference of the relation to the speech time. Aspect, on the other hand, refers to how an event unfolds in time, such as whether an event is on-going or has already been completed (Comrie 1976; Smith 1991, 1997). Aspectual meaning is mainly determined by both lexical aspect and grammatical aspect (Smith 1991, 1997). Grammatical aspect “is characterized as different ways of presenting a situation as a completed whole, viewed as if from outside, or as an ongoing, incomplete action, viewed as if from inside” (Comrie 1976: 3); the former is called perfective aspect while the latter is called imperfective aspect. For example, ‘he read the paper’ encodes perfective aspect, while ‘he was reading the paper’ encodes imperfective aspect, although both of the sentences are in the past tense. As for the lexical aspect, the most well-known classification is the Vendler/Dowty’s four-way classification (Vendler 1957; Dowty 1979) of verb phrases into achievements, accomplishments, activities and statives according to their temporal semantic features such as dynamicity, durativity and telicity. The four-way distinction can be expressed in the following way (Shirai & ­Andersen 1995: 744): Achievement: the event takes place instantaneously and is reducible to a single point in time (e.g. ‘recognize’, ‘die’, ‘reach the summit’). Accomplishment: the event has some duration as well as a single clear inherent endpoint (e.g. ‘run a mile’, ‘make a chair’, ‘build a house’, ‘write a letter’). Activity: the event has duration, but with an arbitrary endpoint, and is homogenous in its structure. (e.g. in ‘John is running’, at every moment, the fact of his running has the same quality of ‘running’.) State: the event is not dynamic, and can continue without additional effort or energy being applied (e.g. ‘see’, ‘love’, ‘hate’, ‘want’).

Achievements and accomplishments share the feature of having a clear endpoint signaling change-of-state (i.e. telic). Activities and states share the feature of not having

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a clear endpoint (i.e. atelic). The difference between achievements and accomplishments is that achievements do not have duration (i.e. punctual), but accomplishments do (i.e. durative). The difference between activites and states is that activities need additional energy to maintain the activity (i.e. dynamic), but states do not (i.e. stative). Many operational tests have been proposed to classify the verbs into the four inherent aspectual categories. Dowty (1979: 60) has the most comprehensive classification with 11 different tests.

2.1.2  The Aspect Hypothesis in first language acquisition The Aspect Hypothesis proposes that language learners will be influenced by the inherent lexical aspect of verbs when they acquire tense-aspect morphology (Bloom et al. 1980; Andersen & Shirai 1994). The prediction is summarized as follows (Andersen & Shirai 1996: 533). 1. Children first use past marking (e.g. English) or perfective marking (e.g. Chinese, Spanish) on achievement and accomplishment verbs, eventually extending their use to activity and finally to stative verbs. 2. In languages that encode the perfective-imperfective distinction, imperfective past appears later than perfective past, and imperfective past marking begins with stative verbs and activity verbs, then extending to accomplishment and achievement verbs. 3. In languages that have progressive aspect, children first use progressive marking mostly with activity verbs, then extending it to accomplishment and achievement verbs. 4. Children do not incorrectly overextend progressive markings to stative verbs. One possible source for a learner’s tendency to use verb morphology in the manner predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis is the distributional bias in native speakers’ speech (Andersen 1986, 1990). According to the Distributional Bias Hypothesis, native speakers tend to combine a certain verb morpheme with one specific class of verbs in their normal interaction. When learners are exposed to this kind of input from native speakers, they initially often exaggerate this kind of biased combination. The mothers’ and children’s data in Shirai (1991) supported the Distributional Bias Hypothesis and the Aspect Hypothesis, respectively. Although Weist (2002: 44) pointed out that the cross-linguistic studies did not always support the predictions of points 2 and 3 of the Aspect Hypothesis on the distinction of perfective and imperfective aspect and on the progressive aspect, studies (Bloom et al. 1980; Antinucci & Miller 1976; Shirai & Andersen 1995) consistently supported the first prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis on past tense, which is one of the target morphemes in the current study.



Chapter 1.  The development of third person singular present form -s

As mentioned above, although much research has been done on the semantic characteristics on the development of inflectional morphology for past tense and progressive markers, most of which provide support for the Aspect Hypothesis, there has not been much empirical research done on the development of 3S in relation to verb semantics. There is thus no clear picture about whether the development of -s supports the effect of lexical aspect. To some extent, 3S is a tense morpheme. It is often called a marker of present tense, and it creates a 3-way system in conjunction with progressive and past inflections (Andersen & Shirai 1994). The present tense -s predominantly indicates stative and habitual situations, and children experience cognitive difficulties in acquiring the habitual reference (Brown 1973; Shirai 1991). Therefore, if we extend the Aspect Hypothesis, the present tense -s should be predominantly used with stative verbs at early stages of children’s speech. However, the morpheme -s is also referred to as a verbal agreement or number concord marker, which is different from the progressive and past inflection morphemes. In the present study, we use three children’s longitudinal data from the CHILDES database to investigate the developmental characteristics of 3S, and test whether the present tense marker in English is also influenced by the effect of lexical aspects as the progressive aspect and the past tense markers.

2.2  The Verb-Island Hypothesis One of the most influential recent accounts of early grammatical development is Tomasello’s (1992) Verb-Island Hypothesis. The individual islands of verb organization, item-specific nature of children’s early speech was widely documented in the 1970s and the 1980s as evidence in inflection for tense, aspect, and person (Berman & Dromi 1984; Bloom et al. 1980), wh-question construction (Forner 1979; Bloom, ­Merkin & Wootten 1982), argument structures and syntactic multiword constructions (Bowerman 1976). It is widely acknowledged that children’s early speech is fragmentary and lacks uniformity in the morpho-syntactic frames in which different verbs appear in the same period of acquisition. Given this background, Tomasello’s VerbIsland Hypothesis (1992) provided a new way to account for the well-known lexicalspecific application of grammatical rules in young children’s speech. According to this hypothesis, children start producing multi-word speech without knowledge of syntactic categories, such as noun and verb. The verbs do not operate in the grammatical frame as a coherent class; they operate as individual islands of organization. Children’s early language use is based on “the functionally based distributional analysis” (Tomasello 1992: 28) of the language input instead of syntactic categories. The Verb-Island Hypothesis is a two-stage theory of the development of a verbal system. In the first stage, children’s productions of verbal argument structure are lexically specific, that is, based on particular verbs. Namely, children’s grammars are insular and each verb is

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its own island of organization and is an “unorganized grammatical system”; “ordering patterns and morphological markers learned for one verb do not immediately generalize to other verbs” (ibid: 23). And only later at the second stage, do children start to develop abstract categories and constructions, and construct an interconnected verbal system. At the second and later syntactic development stage, the grammar learned for other verbs can serve as input to be generalized by some possible mechanism of similarity, analogy, or item-based transfer of learning. Thus, we argue that the Verb-Island Hypothesis predicts that verb-island effects may result in a case of frequency effects on children’s acquisition of lexically-specific structure at early stages; however, the frequency effect gradually weakens as the children develop abstract categories and rules.1

3.  P  revious research on the acquisition of third person singular present form -s (3S) As noted above, few studies have investigated the acquisition of 3S in relation to verb semantics or frequency effect, and therefore there is no clear picture about what may take place. We review existing studies related to the acquisition of 3S. Brown (1973) examined the developing language of children and analyzed the early stages of grammatical constructions and the meanings they conveyed based on three children’s longitudinal recordings: Adam (from 2;3 to 5;2), Eve (from 1;6 to 2;3) and Sarah (from 2;3 to 4;0). Brown investigated the acquisition order of 14 English morphemes which included the past tense marker and 3S. Based on the mean length of utterance (MLU), the children’s data were divided into five stages (Stage I, MLU = 1.75; Stage II, MLU = 2.25; Stage III, MLU = 2.75; Stage IV, MLU = 3.5; Stage V, MLU = 4.0). The acquisition of both past tense and 3S occurred around stages IV and V. The data showed that the order of the 14 morphemes’ acquisition is almost identical across children, and is predicted by their relative semantic and grammatical complexity instead of their input frequency. Bloom et al. (1980) investigated the acquisition of the three English inflections progressive -ing, past tense (regular and irregular past), and third person singular present -s, from the recording data of four children (Eric, Gia, Kathryn and Peter) whose ages range from 1; 10 to 2; 4. Based on the sequence of development and/or semantic/ syntactic structure, they classified verbs into three categories: action (‘eat’, ‘hit’, ‘bite’, ‘run’), locative action (‘go’, ‘put’, ‘sit’, ‘fit’), and state (‘see’, ‘like’, ‘want’, ‘sleep’). The data

.  Based on Johnson et al. (2005) suggest that children can produce 3S without u ­ nderstanding it until they are 5 years old. This indicates that the production of 3S is in the first stage without the direction of abstract rule and is in the early stage defined by Tomasello.



Chapter 1.  The development of third person singular present form -s

showed that the three morphemes were distributed selectively with different semantics of verb aspect. The most frequent verbs that occurred with -ing and past tense were action verbs. More specifically, the verbs expressing durative, non-completive events such as ‘play’, ‘hold’, ‘ride’ and ‘write’, occurred almost exclusively with -ing; the verbs expressing non-durative, momentary events such as ‘find’, ‘fall’ and ‘break’ occurred exclusively with past tense. In contrast, verbs used with 3S conveyed the patient locative action ‘go’ (such as ‘this goes here’) and state verbs. Shirai (1991) investigated the distribution of past tense, progressive -ing, and 3S by selecting samples of three children’s data from CHILDES database. The percentage of different verbs occurring with -s were different. Children had a certain tendency to combine 3S with stative verbs. For Adam, the percentages of -s with stative for four stages from the earliest to (stage 1) the latest, (stage 4) (based on MLU) were 100% (1 verb token), 50% (6 verb tokens), 54% (22 verb tokens), and 51% (44 verb tokens), respectively; for Eve, the percentages were 0%, 38% (3 verb tokens), and 39% (11 verb tokens), respectively; for Naomi, the percentages were 100% (3 verb tokens), 40% (4 verb tokens), 22% (10 verb tokens), and 51% (60 verb tokens), respectively. Thus, 3S was associated with stative verbs, although the relationship was not as strong as that for progressive with activities (at stage 1, 58% for Adam; 75% for Eve; and 68% for Naomi) or past forms with achievements (at stage 1, 96% for Adam; 100% for Eve; and 100% for Naomi). However, the token number of statives with -s is too small to reach a conclusion for the association of -s with statives. Shirai (1991) showed that the initial restriction of particular sets of verbs gradually weakened as the child grew older, and tense-aspect markers, such as past tense, progressive and 3S, occurred gradually with all types of verbs. In Li and Shirai (2000), the mother’s natural input was used to simulate the production with a connectionist model. The network received phonological and semantic representations of input words representative of actual adult speech from the CHILDES database. The study showed the results of the network’s production of different verb types with three suffixes: -ing, -ed, and -s (the simulation did not include irregular past tense forms). The percentages of suffix used with different verb types in the input data in the simulation were highly consistent with empirical patterns observed in the input data in early child language: the progressive marker -ing was strongly related to activities (69%, 74%, 67% and 67% at four stages); the past tense marker to telic verbs (77%, 77%, 69% and 65%); 3S to statives (67%, 83%, 60%, and 69%). The major patterns reproduced by the network’s learning according to the tense-aspect suffixes at the different learning stages are 75%; 66%; 64%; and 52% for the progressive marker -ing combined with activities, 82%; 84%; 74%; and 77% for the past tense marker with telic verbs, and 100%, 100%, 100%, 80% for 3S with statives. The results showed that the association between verb types and suffixes were stronger in the network’s production than they were in the input to the network. This means the network behaved more restrictively than what was in the input with respect to the relationship between lexical and grammatical aspect.

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Also interesting is the higher rate of restriction of -s to stative verbs than past and progressive in the network simulation even though input condition is roughly identical for three morphemes. Although it cannot be claimed that the network’s behavior equals children’s, the results suggest the importance of input on acquisition. Theakston et al. (2003) investigated the role of the input in the acquisition of third person singular verbs in English. Two groups of 24 children aged between 2 years 6 months and 3 years were exposed to 6 known and 3 novel verbs used either in declaratives (e.g. ‘it jumps’) or in questions (e.g. ‘will it jump?’), or in both declaratives and questions. The children were then asked questions such as ‘What does this one do? What does it do?, and answered ‘It….’ so that use of the verbs in either finite or nonfinite contexts could be elicited. The results showed that for novel verbs, the proportion of children using 3S was highly affected by the input of finite or nonfinite forms. This finding suggests that, at least initially, children learned to produce 3S on a verb-by-verb basis, and the learning was input-driven. For known verbs, the proportion was not affected by the input in the tests. This suggests that the development of more abstract linguistic constructions occurred only gradually over the course of development. This finding supports the Verb-Island Hypothesis, in which the learning is assumed to proceed from a system of item-based construction to a more abstract rule-based construction. From the previous research, we can draw two general pictures for the children acquisition of 3S: (a) children tend to combine 3S with statives (Bloom et al. 1980; Shirai 1991; Li & Shirai 2000); (b) children’s productions of morphological markers were affected by input at first and then by abstract linguistic knowledge (Theakston et al. 2003). Although previous research showed some association of 3S with statives, the relationship with lexical aspect was not as strong as other tense-aspect inflections. In addition, few studies focused on the association of -s with lexical aspect. Therefore, we still do not have a clear picture of the association of -s with statives. Although 3S is called a marker of present tense, it also functions as a verbal agreement (e.g. in ‘She/*I likes dancing’, third person subject is required) or number concord marker (e.g. ‘my brother/*brothers goes to school’, singular subject is required), which is different from progressive and past inflections. In the present study, in order to get a clear picture of how 3S develops, we analyzed all of the available files in three children’s data, compared 3S with past tense in terms of the effect of lexical aspect, and ran the frequency correlation of mother’s input and child’s production.

4.  Present research 4.1  Research questions The goal of the present study is to investigate the child acquisition of English 3S to test whether the Aspect Hypothesis or the Verb-Island Hypothesis is more plausible as an



Chapter 1.  The development of third person singular present form -s

account for the development of 3S, in comparison to past tense marking. The following are specific questions raised and some predictions made by the Aspect Hypothesis and the Verb-Island Hypothesis. The research questions and the hypotheses are as follows: Research Question 1: What are the distributional characteristics of mothers’ speech in the use of 3S addressed to their children? What is the difference between 3S and past tense inflection in terms of the distribution in mothers’ speech? Hypothesis 1: Based on the Distributional Bias Hypothesis, there should be the tendency for -s and the past tense marker (regular and irregular past) to be used with particular types of verbs. Based on the previous research reviewed above, -s tends to combine with statives while past tense tends to combine with accomplishments and achievements. Research Question 2: What are the distributional characteristics in the children’s use of 3S? What is the difference between 3S and past tense inflection in terms of the distribution in children’s speech? Hypothesis 2: The Aspect Hypothesis predicts that children’s production is influenced by lexical aspect, therefore they tend to combine -s with statives and the past tense marker with accomplishments and achievements. The Verb-Island Hypothesis predicts that the use of verb inflections by children is affected by input frequency, that is, mothers’ speech, at early stages. Namely, there is a high correlation between the frequency of children’s production and mothers’ input in terms of each verb at early stages. Research Question 3: How do the distributional characteristics of children’s speech change as they grow older? What is the difference between 3S and past tense inflection in terms of the change? Hypothesis 3: The Aspect Hypothesis predicts that the association of -s with statives and the past tense marker with achievements and accomplishments becomes weaker and the distribution more similar to that of adults as children grow older. The Verb-Island Hypothesis predicts that after children develop syntactic categories and rules, they can generalize the grammar learned for one verb to other verbs. Consequently, the input effect for the acquisition of 3S weakens gradually.

4.2  Methodology The data sets consist of the transcribed and coded speech of three children, two from Brown (1973) and one from Sachs (1983) in the database of CHILDES (­MacWhinney 2000, MacWhinney & Snow 1985, 1990): Adam from age 2;3 to 5;2, Eve from age 1;6 to 2;3, and Naomi from age 1;2 to 4;9. Following Shirai (1991), these three children were selected because their data include relatively early stages of children’s speech data and extend over a long period of language acquisition, which are necessary for examining the emergence and the development of verbal morphology as well as how the mothers’ input and ­children’s productions change over time.

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a. Data screening Since the mother was the main source of input for children in the days the data were collected, the present study only included mother’s speech as the input data set. Since the focus of the study is on the acquisition of -s and its comparison with the past tense marker, following Shirai (1991), we only selected all the clauses that had finite main verbs. The followings are excluded from analysis: copulas, ‘do’ auxiliary, modal auxiliary, periphrastic forms (‘be going to’, ‘have to’), imperatives and verbs that do not conjugate for past tense. The form ‘I got + NP’ was excluded for past tense, because it is the equivalent of ‘I’ve got + NP’ (i.e. a present colloquial form of ‘I have…’). Furthermore, the study excluded frozen idiomatic expressions, such as ‘Jesus loves me’, ‘pop goes the weasel’, ‘Yankee doodle went to town’, which were rare in the three children’s speech anyway. b. Data analysis The data were divided based on MLU calculated by using the CLAN program ­(MacWhinney 2000). Adam: from 2;3 to 5;2, 55 hours recording, 55 files Stage 1: MLU 5, 13 hours (4;1–5;2), 13 files Eve: from 1;6 to 2;3, 20 hours recording, 20 files Stage 1: MLU