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10 - Time

from Part II - A CROSS-LINGUISTIC STUDY OF CHILDREN'S NARRATIVES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2009

Maya Hickmann
Affiliation:
Université de Paris V
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Summary

As previously shown (Chapter 6), the available research concerning children's uses of temporal-aspectual markings presents several claims concerning acquisition in this domain. Some studies argue that universal properties of verb semantics and/or concepts of situations determine how these devices are used, further putting forth the hypothesis that young children mark situation aspect rather than tense. In contrast, other studies show the impact of language-specific and/or of discourse functional determinants on acquisition, which are not taken into account by this hypothesis. In the analyses of the corpora below, I first describe the general distributions of all temporal-aspectual devices in the narratives (Section 10.1). I then examine whether the semantic properties of predicates affect the uses of verbal morphology, with particular attention to the presumed universal impact of boundedness on the uses of past and/or perfective markings (Section 10.2). Finally, I turn to discourse determinants of these uses (Section 10.3), examining different types of temporal anchoring in the narratives, as well as temporal-aspectual shifts and uses of connectives. In conclusion (Section 10.4), the presented evidence partly supports the defective tense hypothesis, suggesting that situation aspect affects children's uses to some extent. However, it also shows the need to modify this hypothesis for two reasons: the gradual loosening of this association partly results from the requirements of discourse organisation and the language to be acquired has an impact on the strength of this original association, as well as on the subsequent loosening process.

Type
Chapter
Information
Children's Discourse
Person, Space and Time across Languages
, pp. 282 - 317
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2002

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  • Time
  • Maya Hickmann, Université de Paris V
  • Book: Children's Discourse
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486784.011
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  • Time
  • Maya Hickmann, Université de Paris V
  • Book: Children's Discourse
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486784.011
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Time
  • Maya Hickmann, Université de Paris V
  • Book: Children's Discourse
  • Online publication: 22 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511486784.011
Available formats
×