| Summary: | The current dissertation is concerned with the acquisition of tense and aspect by Greekspeaking children. The 'Lexical Aspect First' (LAFH) and the 'Grammatical Aspect First' (GAFH) hypotheses were investigated, with a comprehension and a production task each. ' According to the LAFH children mainly combine past tense or perfective morphology with telic verbs and present tense or imperfective morphology with atelic verbs. The GAFH, on the other hand, claims that children primarily combine past tense with complete events and present tense with ongoing or incomplete events. The results suggest that Greek-speaking children, from the age of 2;8, possess the temporal concepts in order to understand the past, the present and the future tenses. In addition, they have the ability to comprehend the past and the present tenses when temporally ordered, as well as the t\vo types ~f grammatical aspect - perfective and imperfective - without being influenced by either lexical aspect or completion information. A problem exists with future tense morphology, since its comprehension seems to depend on lexical aspect. Neither of the hypotheses examined are supported in comprehension, while the GAFH is also not supported in production. The LAFH appears to hold for both children and adults in production and this finding has significant implications concerning the nature of the LAFH as an acquisitional pattern. Finally, the comprehension of the Past Perfective and the Past Imperfective tenses was ~ further examined through two tasks. Greek-speaking children were able from 3;0 years to distinguish the aspectual markers of the two past tenses; the mapping process appears to have begun at the age of 3;0, but it remains in~omplete for both past tenses until almost the age of 6;5. Children were significantly influenced in both their Past Perfective and their Past Imperfective comprehension by the status of the direct object and the access that they had to it (full or partial).
|
|---|
