Emerging temporality: past tense and temporal/aspectual markers in Spanish-speaking children's intra-conversational narratives

Paola Uccelli

doi:10.1017/s0305000908009288

Abstract

This study describes how young Spanish-speaking children become gradually more adept at encoding temporality using grammar and discourse skills in intra-conversational narratives. The research involved parallel case studies of two Spanish-speaking children followed longitudinally from ages two to three. Type/token frequencies of verb tense, temporal/aspectual markers and narrative components were analyzed to explore interrelationships among grammatical and discourse skills. Children progressed from scattered unsystematic means of encoding temporality to mastering a basic linguistic system that included devices to mark location of events, temporal relations and aspectual meanings. The consolidation of perfective past tense to express narrative events marked a crucial developmental point which preceded an explosion of additional verb tenses and temporal markers. The value of spontaneous language data, and the need to study grammar and discourse simultaneously to construct a comprehensive developmental picture are highlighted. Results are discussed in relation to theoretical proposals on the development of temporality.

Highlights

IntroductionThe first is to document how the use of past tense verbs changes over time in Spanish-speaking children’s intra-conversational narratives from two to three years of age
The aims of this study are twofold
This study examines the synchronous and asynchronous relationships among different temporal skills at the grammatical and discourse levels to relate the findings to the theoretical claims just reviewed

Summary

Introduction

The first is to document how the use of past tense verbs changes over time in Spanish-speaking children’s intra-conversational narratives from two to three years of age. The second is to explore children’s use of past tense verbs in relation to their use of UCCELLI temporal/aspectual markers in co-constructed narrative discourse at this early age. In narratives about past or fictional events, children have to move from the ‘ here-and- ’ to the ‘there-andthen ’, and cannot rely as much on contextual support (Sachs, 1983). This discourse genre requires, in Gerhardt’s (1988 : 205) words, ‘the capacity to use language as its own context ’. Temporality is a crucial dimension of narratives as the temporal sequence of events is what moves the plot forward (Labov & Waletzky, 1967)

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Conclusion