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A Japanese child's use of stative and punctual verbs

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 February 2009

Gary A. Cziko  and
Keiko Koda
Gary A. Cziko*
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Keiko Koda
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
*
Bureau of Educational Research, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1310 South Sixth Street, Champaign, IL 61820, USA.
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Abstract

This study investigated the use of stative, process, punctual, and non-punctual verbs by a child acquiring Japanese as a first language between the ages of 1;0 and 4;11 in an attempt to find evidence for two of Bickerton's (1981) proposed language acquisition universals, which form part of the language bioprogram hypothesis of language acquisition. As predicted by Bickerton's state-process hypothesis, it was found that all sampled present progressive verb forms occurred with process verbs while these forms were never used with stative verbs. Also, with only one exception, all omissions of present progressive forms occurred with the early use of ‘mixed’ verbs, i.e. verbs which behave syntactically as process verbs in Japanese but are nonetheless semantically stative. However, contrasting with Bickerton's hypothesis that children initially use the past tense to mark punctuality, no relationship between past tense use and punctuality was found.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , February 1987 , pp. 99 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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