The Aspect Marker -Le in Early Child Mandarin

Abstract

Cross-linguistically, researchers have found a distributional bias of tense/aspect markers in child languages, namely, children initially use past or perfective morphology with telic predicates and use present or progressive morphology with atelic predicates. One attempt to explain this phenomenon is the Prototype Account, which argues that children acquire a linguistic category starting with the prototype of the category and later extend its application to less prototypical cases (Shirai & Andersen 1995). Based on the English data, they argue that children do not distinguish between past/perfective and telicity, which is the prototype for category past and category perfective. This study presents evidence from Mandarin data of two young children, which supports the distributional bias found in the older children in Li (1990), but opposes the Prototype Account given the fact that Mandarin-speaking children do not have a macro-category of past/perfective/telic marked by the perfective -le. The finding argues for (i) a separation between past and perfective/telic and a separation between perfective and telic in child Mandarin, (ii) the necessity to distinguish perfective -le from sentence final le, (iii) the legitimacy to treat Mandarin adjectives as stative verbs, and (iv) the importance to examine verbs appearing in their basic forms without aspect markers.