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The communicative contexts of grammatical aspect use in English*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2013

PAUL IBBOTSON ,
ELENA LIEVEN  and
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
PAUL IBBOTSON*
Affiliation:
University of Manchester, UK
ELENA LIEVEN
Affiliation:
University of Manchester, UK
MICHAEL TOMASELLO
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Germany
*
Address for correspondence: Paul Ibbotson, School of Psychological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom. e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

In many of the world's languages grammatical aspect is used to indicate how events unfold over time. In English, activities that are ongoing can be distinguished from those that are completed using the morphological marker -ing. Using naturalistic observations of two children in their third year of life, we quantify the availability and reliability of the imperfective form in the communicative context of the child performing actions. On average, 30% of verbal descriptions refer to child actions that are grounded in the here-and-now. Of these utterances, there are two features of the communicative context that reliably map onto the functions of the imperfective, namely, that events are construed as ongoing and from within. The findings are discussed with reference to how the context in which a child hears aspectual language may limit the degrees of freedom on what these constructions mean.

Type
Brief Research Reports
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , May 2014 , pp. 705 - 723
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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Footnotes

[*]

Thank you to Nikki Shepherd who coded and organized the data, to Laura Wagner, and to the anonymous reviewers who provided insightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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