Kyung Sook Shin

<kyungs@hawaii.edu>

Department of Linguistics
University of Hawaii at Manoa

## Paper for BUCLD 29, Boston, 2004 ##

The Development of Tense and Aspect in Child Korean

This study investigates how Korean children acquire tense and aspect by addressing two research questions: (1) whether Korean children initially use tense morphology to encode grammatical aspect rather than tense (Grammatical Aspect Hypothesis, Wagner 2001) or inherent lexical aspect (the Aspect Hypothesis, Shirai & Andersen 1995), and (2) why such patterns may occur in child Korean.  Two hypotheses are considered: (a) the Distributional Bias Hypothesis, which attributes the aspect before tense phenomenon to input (Li 1989), and (b) the Cognitive Limitation Hypothesis, which attributes the phenomenon to underdevelopment of temporal concepts (Bronckart & Sinclair 1973). 

The Korean tense marker –ess refers to a past eventuality or a perfective eventuality, depending on the inherent lexical aspect of the predicate.  When used with non-punctual atelic verbs (such as adjectival verbs, states and durative activities), it refers to past events. When used with punctual or telic verbs (such as punctual activities, accomplishments and achievements), it indicates perfective aspect as well as past tense.  Korean presents an interesting case to test whether children initially develop tense morphology to encode aspect or tense.

My study of the early use of -ess came from the naturalistic speech of two Korean children (1;7-2;5) and the speech directed to them from their mothers.  All predicates on which –ess occurred were identified and then coded for the inherent lexical aspect of the predicate as well as the grammatical aspect (if any).

The results show that the children initially encoded –ess on punctual activity verbs as well as telic verbs, contrary to the Aspect Hypothesis.  That is, telicity was not a factor in determining whether –ess occurred or not.  Importantly, the children initially used the tense marker –ess to refer to perfective aspect rather than past tense, which supports the Grammatical Aspect Hypothesis since grammatical aspect is being encoded by a tense marker.  It was further found that this pattern of usage was not attested in the child-directed speech: the mothers tended to use the tense marker primarily with durative activity verbs to encode past tense (and not perfective aspect).  This contradicts the Distributional Bias Hypothesis.  Finally, it was found that the children started to use time adverbs when they began to use the tense marker to refer to past events, which supports the Cognitive Limitation Hypothesis.  This provides evidence supporting that the children acquire aspect earlier than past tense and develop the temporal concepts in the following steps: pre-temporal stage > aspect stage > past tense stage. 

References

Bronckart, J. P., and H. Sinclair. 1973. Time, tense, and aspect. Cognition 2. 107-30.

Li, Ping. 1989. Aspect and tense in child Mandarin. Leiden, Netherlands: University of Leiden dissertation.

Shirai, Y and Anserson, R. 1995. The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: A prototype account. Language 71. 743-762.

Wagner, Laura. 2001. Aspectual influences on early tense comprehension. Journal of Child Language 28. 661-681.