Finiteness systems and lexical aspect in child Polish and English

Abstract

The purpose of this research was to discover how the aspectual properties of predicate structure influence the acquisition of agreement and tense morphology in Polish and English. We investigated the corpora of six children learning each language by tracking the emergence of their verb morphology within a set of predicates in each of three categories, i.e., stative, dynamic-atelic, and dynamic-telic. We used contrast as a measure of acquisition, e.g., past versus nonpast. In Polish, the age of the initial contrast in agreement and in tense was very similar for dynamic predicates, and agreement emerged before tense in stative predicates. In English, contrasts in tense preceded contrasts in agreement for dynamic predicates, but the pattern of acquisition was the same for stative predicates. The interaction of grammatical and lexical aspect permeated the pattern of the acquisition of the finite morphology. For stative predicates, finite contrasts occur exclusively in the imperfective aspect in Polish and exclusively in the nonprogressive aspect in English. In Polish, finite contrasts for atelic predicates were very likely to be found in the imperfective aspect and telic predicates in the perfective aspect. The related pattern in English was much less distinct. In Polish, when a contrast in agreement (e.g., 3rd versus 1st person singular) coincided with a contrast in tense (e.g., past versus future), all of the children demonstrated the capacity to immediately (i.e., without further development) produce the agreement contrast in both tenses. These findings indicate that the children are acquiring their knowledge of tense and agreement in a systematic manner driven by the acquisition of predicate-argument structure.