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SUMMARY:The influence of verb semantics on children’s acquisition of ver
 bal inflections in Tamil - Lavanya Sankaran (RCEAL)
DTSTART:20070313T160000Z
DTEND:20070313T173000Z
UID:TALK6324@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Teresa Parodi
DESCRIPTION:In all languages there is a close relationship between the sem
 antic properties of verbs and temporal-aspectual markings (Hickmann\, 1995
 : 212). My study aims to test the influence of verb semantics on Tamil chi
 ldren’s acquisition of tense and aspect markers. Studies in English\, Fr
 ench\, Spanish and Italian in first language acquisition studies have show
 n that children associate past and perfective inflections with telic verbs
  and progressive and imperfective inflections with durative verbs (Shirai 
 & Anderson\, 1994:135). These findings support the aspect hypothesis which
  asserts that verb inflections in early interlanguage systems are predomin
 antly used as markers of lexical aspect and that early inflections are in 
 fact redundant in meaning with the inherent semantic features of the verbs
  they are associated with (Li Ping\, 1990: 51\, 57).  But\, although the e
 mpirical evidence from these language studies strongly support the aspect 
 hypothesis\, data from a range of non-European languages is urgently neede
 d in order to strengthen the hypothesis’ claim. Tamil\, one of the oldes
 t Dravidian languages\, would make an interesting study because it uses se
 parate linguistic devices to code distinctions between tense and aspect. T
 he fact that aspect marking is not obligatory in Tamil\, but that the mark
 ing of tense is\, also makes important predictions for the aspect hypothes
 is. \n\nI have carried out three different experiments with Tamil children
  aged between 2\;4 years and 4\;8 years and they comprised of a production
  task\, a comprehension task and an imitation task.  The results have been
  evaluated against the performance of eight adult native speakers of Tamil
  who also participated in the same three experiments. The findings help to
  analyse the claims made by the aspect hypothesis and also show to what ex
 tent verb semantics influences Tamil children’s acquisition of temporal-
 aspectual inflections. \n\nBibliography\nHickmann\, M. (1995). ‘Discours
 e Organisation and the Development of Reference to Person\, Space and Time
 ’. In The Handbook of Child Language. Blackwell Publishers.\nLi Ping. (1
 990). Aspect and Aktionsart in Child Mandarin. PhD dissertation.\nShirai\,
  Y. & Anderson\, R. (1994). Discourse Motivations for some Cognitive Acqui
 sition Principles. Cambridge University Press.
LOCATION:GR-05\, English Faculty Building
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