Language Acquisition and aspectual compositionality

• Main Authors: Gisely Gonçalves de Castro, Arabie Bezri Hermont
• Format: Article
• Language: Portuguese
• Published: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro 2018-12-01
• Series: Revista Linguística
• Subjects: Aspecto Semântico; Aspecto Gramatical; Composicionalidade Aspectual; Aquisição da linguagem.
• Online Access: https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/rl/article/view/19778

This paper examines the relationship between grammatical aspect and semantic aspect in the process of language acquisition. The hypothesis under consideration comes from Verkuyl (2005). Therefore, it will be argued that the observed usage pattern of aspect in child language results from a compositional interpretation of aspect. The results obtained were as follows: (i) the verbs [-ADDTO] had imperfective marking; (ii) the verbs [+ADDTO] had perfective marking; (iii) VPs [+ADDTO, -SQA] tended to be imperfectly labeled; and (iv) VPs [+ADDTO, +SQA] had perfective marking. The patterns found in the data indicate a compositional interpretation of aspect.