Temporal deixis in early child Romanian

TEMPORAL DEIXIS IN EARLY CHILD ROMANIAN Ioana Stoicescu* Abstract: This paper investigates the contrastive use of tense-aspect inflections in early child Romanian. It focuses on the use of the prezent, perfect compus and the periphrastic future morphologies. It finds evidence of the ability to inflect a significant number of the verbs in all the tenses mentioned below the age of 3;0. Additionally, by analysing the context of occurrence of these child predicates, it shows that a basic system of temporal deixis becomes operative before the above-mentioned age. Consequently, the evidence presented by the paper runs against the claims of the Aspect First Hypothesis. Keywords: tense, aspect, morphology, deixis, acquisition 1. Introduction The early tense-aspect inflectional morphology has been the focus of intensive study. Two research trends are more prominent. One emphasises the fact that, crosslinguistically, inflectional morphology is distributed function of the situation aspect of the predicate. Imperfective or progressive inflections are associated to atelic predicates and perfective or past inflections are associated to telic predicates. The fact that tense-aspect inflections are restricted to certain situation aspect classes and not used for all situation aspect classes alike led to the hypothesis that such morphemes play a different role in child language than they do in adult language. According to the Aspect First Hypothesis, early inflections do not encode temporal deixis, but the situation aspect of the predicate. The competing hypothesis is that tense-aspect inflections play the same role in child language as they do in the adult language. They are markers of temporal deixis, i.e. the temporal relation between the event and the now of the speech event. Children’s system of temporal deixis is nevertheless assumed to be less developed than the adult system. This hypothesis predicts that children are aware of basic tense contrasts, and can produce tense forms contrastively very early on. The present paper investigates the acquisition of three Romanian tense forms the prezent, perfect compus and the periphrastic future. It shows that the contrastive use of tense morphology emerges from the onset of language acquisition. In relation to the prezent, it explores the use of this form in early Romanian, and argues that the child is able to access not only the default imperfective reading, but also habitual, generic and modal readings. In relation to the perfect compus, it shows that the predicates inflected for this tense designate both very recent events with a clear resultative component and events in the remote past as well. In relation to the periphrastic future it argues that Romanian children are able to use it as a marker of posteriority to speech time. * University of Bucharest, Faculty of Orthodox Theology, Department of Historical and Biblical Theology and Philology, . Io a na St oic es c u 134 Overall, the paper presents evidence for the presence of a basic system of temporal deixis in child Romanian, which rules out the view that tense forms are markers of situation aspect. 2. The Romanian tense-aspect system Romanian has both analytical and synthetic tenses for the indicative mood. The synthetic tenses are the prezent (the present), the perfect simplu (the simple perfect), the imperfect (the imperfective past), and the mai-mult-ca-perfect (the pluperfect). There is also an analytic perfect, the perfect compus (the compound perfect), which comprises the auxiliary a avea ‘have’ in its phonologically reduced form (am/ai/a/am/aţi/au) and the past participle. The future is formed periphrastically. The future used in the formal register is formed with an auxiliary (voi/vei/va/vom/veţi/vor) and the infinitive: vor pleca ‘will leave’. The colloquial future comprises the morpheme o or the auxiliary a avea and a subjunctive structure: o să plec/am să plec ‘I will leave’). The prezent has a default imperfective reading (1a) but may acquire habitual (1b), generic (1c) and modal interpretations (1d). It is very frequently used with a future interpretation instead of the syntactically more complex periphrastic future (1e). (1) a. b. c. d. e. Vine maşina. comes car-the ‘The car is coming.’ Câinele meu muşcă. dog-the my bites ‘My dog bites.’ Păsările zboară. birds-the fly ‘Birds fly.’ Acum pleci! now leave ‘I want you to go now.’ Mâine plec la Bucureşti. tomorrow leave at Bucharest ‘I am leaving to Bucharest tomorrow.’ The Romanian perfective past perfectul simplu (simple perfect) is infrequently used. It has been replaced almost entirely by the analytic perfect – the perfect compus (compound perfect). This tense originated as a perfect, but it has enriched its semantics and can be used both as a perfect (2a) and a preterite (2b) (Vişan 2006). (2) a. A venit în Bucureşti de ieri. has come in Bucharest since yesterday ‘He has been in Bucharest since yesterday.’ Temporal deixis in early child Romanian b. 135 Ieri ea a plecat mai devreme. yesterday she has left more early ‘Yesterday she left earlier.’ The colloquial future is the future form most frequently used in informal Romanian (GBLR: 257). It expresses predictions about impending events and, as any future, it is inherently modal (GBLR: 257). (3) O să aibă probleme. o SĂ have-SUBJ problems ‘He will have problems.’ 3. Previous research on the acquisition of tense and aspect The acquisition of verbal inflection has been a fertile ground for research. Longitudinal and experimental studies demonstrated that the correlation between the (a)telicity of the predicate and the likelihood of appearing with a certain inflectional marker is a crosslinguistic fact in both child and adult languages; (i) child languages: English (Smith 1980, Shirai and Andersen 1995), French (Bronckart and Sinclair 1973), Italian (Antinucci and Miller 1976), Romanian (Buja 2008, Stoicescu 2011b, 2012), Polish (Weist et. al. 1984), Greek (Stephany 1981); (ii) adult languages: Greek (Stephany 1981), English (Shirai and Andersen 1995, Boland 2006), Romanian (Stoicescu 2011c, 2012). These studies document the generalisations in (4). (4) a. b. Present / progressive / imperfective morphology generally marks atelic predicates. Past / perfective morphology generally marks telic predicates. Although the above generalizations are an established fact, this was used as a basis for diverging conclusions regarding the nature of the early temporal system. One school of thought proposes that children use tense-aspect inflections as markers of (a)telicity and their tense system is defective. This is the Aspect First Hypothesis. Among the supporters of this hypothesis are Antinucci and Miller (1976). They analyse data from Italianspeaking children aged 1;6-2;5. They claim that atelic verbs are never marked for the past tense, only with the present, while change of state verbs are mainly used in the passato prossimo. This is due to the fact that “t (...truncated)