Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Symbols and abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Bilingual first language acquisition: methods and theories
- 3 A new study of bilingual first language acquisition: aims and hypotheses
- 4 Case study of a bilingual child: introduction
- 5 Language choice and Mixed utterances
- 6 The noun phrase
- 7 The verb phrase
- 8 Syntactic analysis
- 9 The morphological and syntactic analyses: a recapitulation
- 10 Metalinguistic behaviour
- 11 Findings and implications
- References
- Appendix
- Index of names
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- Symbols and abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Bilingual first language acquisition: methods and theories
- 3 A new study of bilingual first language acquisition: aims and hypotheses
- 4 Case study of a bilingual child: introduction
- 5 Language choice and Mixed utterances
- 6 The noun phrase
- 7 The verb phrase
- 8 Syntactic analysis
- 9 The morphological and syntactic analyses: a recapitulation
- 10 Metalinguistic behaviour
- 11 Findings and implications
- References
- Appendix
- Index of names
Summary
Introduction
English and Dutch verb phrases (or VP's) exhibit a number of similarities and differences. Both languages express time and aspect distinctions through the morphological marking of lexical items referring to actions, states and events (i.e., verbs). In addition to the affixing of bound morphemes to these verbs (cf. Dutch ‘speel’ <play> vs. ‘speelde’ <played>), separate free morphemes which themselves are renditions of verbs are relied upon heavily in order to further encode time, aspect and mood distinctions (cf. English ‘The child washed his doll’ vs. ‘The child had washed his doll’). Another similarity between English and Dutch is that there exists a system of person and number agreement between the grammatical subject (typically not a verb) of the sentence and one part of the verb phrase. This part has traditionally been labelled the ‘finite’ verb (see e.g. Palmer 1974, Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech and Svartvik 1985) and we shall follow this tradition here. All other components of the verb phrase are by definition non-finite. Both languages make use of the copula, time, mood and aspect auxiliaries, modal auxiliaries and ‘full’ or lexical verbs (the functions of the auxiliaries are not always equivalent in both languages, though).
English and Dutch differ widely, however, in the way and extent to which they map time and aspect distinctions onto specific verb phrases.
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- The Acquisition of Two Languages from BirthA Case Study, pp. 158 - 236Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990