- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
- The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
- Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The Acquisition of Phonological Inventories
- Phonotactics and Syllable Structure in Infant Speech Perception
- Phonological Processes in Children’s Productions: Convergence with and Divergence from Adult Grammars
- Prosodic Phenomena: Stress, Tone, and Intonation
- Compound Word Formation
- Morpho-phonological Acquisition
- Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy: From Major Prosodic Units to Isolated Word Forms
- Argument Structure
- Voice Alternations (Active, Passive, Middle)
- On the Acquisition of Prepositions and Particles
- A-Movement in Language Development
- The Acquisition of Complements
- Acquisition of Questions
- Root Infinitives in Child Language and the Structure of the Clause
- Mood Alternations
- Null Subjects
- Case and Agreement
- Acquiring Possessives
- Acquisition of Comparatives and Degree Constructions
- Quantification in Child Language
- The Acquisition of Binding and Coreference
- Logical Connectives
- The Expression of Genericity in Child Language
- Lexical and Grammatical Aspect
- Scalar Implicature
- Computational Theories of Learning and Developmental Psycholinguistics
- Statistical Learning, Inductive Bias, and Bayesian Inference in Language Acquisition
- Computational Approaches to Parameter Setting in Generative Linguistics
- Learning with Violable Constraints
- Language Development in Children with Developmental Disorders
- The Genetics of Spoken Language
- Phonological Disorders: Theoretical and Experimental Findings
- References
- Index
- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
Abstract and Keywords
The topic of this chapter is the acquisition of lexical and grammatical aspect. Given wide cross-linguistic variation in aspect expression, the learnability issues center around form-meaning associations: how do learners determine the meaning of a certain aspectual form? Focusing on the literature on telicity and on the perfective-imperfective distinction, two main results stand out. Predicate telicity is easier than compositional telicity. The completion entailment of perfective is acquired at different ages across different languages, somewhere between 2.6 and 5. One novel direction of research asks whether aspect is acquired easier in some languages than in others. The answers will uncover possibly universal aspectual primitives and heuristics that guide children with their task of acquiring temporal meanings.
Keywords: acquisition, grammatical aspect, telicity, perfective, imperfective, form-meaning mapping, cross-linguistic variation
Angeliek van Hout is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Groningen. Her work focuses on the acquisition of form-meaning associations, connecting grammatical theory and experimental methods, especially with crosslinguistic designs. Comparing Germanic, Romance and Slavic languages and beyond, Van Hout has investigated many themes in tense-aspect. Her research on the acquisition of Dutch syntax and semantics furthermore covers topics such as definiteness, quantification, wh-questions, embedding, pronouns and unaccusatives.
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- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
- The Oxford Handbook of Developmental Linguistics
- Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- The Acquisition of Phonological Inventories
- Phonotactics and Syllable Structure in Infant Speech Perception
- Phonological Processes in Children’s Productions: Convergence with and Divergence from Adult Grammars
- Prosodic Phenomena: Stress, Tone, and Intonation
- Compound Word Formation
- Morpho-phonological Acquisition
- Processing Continuous Speech in Infancy: From Major Prosodic Units to Isolated Word Forms
- Argument Structure
- Voice Alternations (Active, Passive, Middle)
- On the Acquisition of Prepositions and Particles
- A-Movement in Language Development
- The Acquisition of Complements
- Acquisition of Questions
- Root Infinitives in Child Language and the Structure of the Clause
- Mood Alternations
- Null Subjects
- Case and Agreement
- Acquiring Possessives
- Acquisition of Comparatives and Degree Constructions
- Quantification in Child Language
- The Acquisition of Binding and Coreference
- Logical Connectives
- The Expression of Genericity in Child Language
- Lexical and Grammatical Aspect
- Scalar Implicature
- Computational Theories of Learning and Developmental Psycholinguistics
- Statistical Learning, Inductive Bias, and Bayesian Inference in Language Acquisition
- Computational Approaches to Parameter Setting in Generative Linguistics
- Learning with Violable Constraints
- Language Development in Children with Developmental Disorders
- The Genetics of Spoken Language
- Phonological Disorders: Theoretical and Experimental Findings
- References
- Index
- Oxford Handbooks in Linguistics
