Semantics of verbs and the development of verb inflection in child language

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SEMANTICS OF VERBS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF VERB INFLECTION IN CHILD LANGUAGE Lois Bloom, Karin Lifter, and Jeremie Hafitz Teachers College, Columbia University The longitudinal emergence of verb inflections (-ing, -s, and -«//irreg) was observed in the spontaneous speech offour American English-speaking children. The occurrence of the inflections, their linguistic/non-linguistic contexts, and the conditional use of the inflections (occurrence in optional or obligatory contexts) are described. The major results of the study are that the inflections -ing, -s, and irreg emerged in the children's speech at the same time, but were distributed selectively with different populations of verbs. The results are discussed in terms of two major factors in the emergence of the verb inflections: the sentence relations between verbs and other constituents, and the semantics of verb aspect. The results are consistent with the general principle of Aspect before tense in linguistic theory and in language development , and provide indirect evidence about the rules that children learn for verb inflectional morphology.* The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship of the semantic organization of verbs used in early sentences vis-à-vis the first emergence of the inflections ofthe verb auxiliary (-ing, -s, -ed/iKREG). In discussions ofthe acquisition of grammatical morphemes by Brown 1973, de Villiers & de Villiers 1973, and others, only the syntax and semantics (along with environmental frequency) of the individual morphemes themselves have been seriously discussed as contributing to the order in which they are acquired. However, the results ofthe present study suggest that the semantic organization ofthe verb system that children learn is at least as important as the meanings of the verb inflections for determining their acquisition. Background 1. There have been few studies of the semantics of verbs in children's early sentences. Bloom, Lightbown & Hood 1975 observed developmental differences between verbs of action and state, and between locative and non-locative actions and states. Bloom, Miller & Hood 1975 extended the categorization of locative verbs, and described three semantic/syntactic subcategories of locative verbs that differed according to the relationship between a verb and its pre-verb and post-verb constituents (subject-verb and verb-complement). Bowerman 1974 used 'error' data to describe the emergence of causative verbs in her two-year-old daughter's language. The implication of these studies is that children learn the verbs of the language as a system and that verbs do not enter children's vocabularies one at a * The data analysis reported here was begun originally in collaboration with Peggy Miller, and we are grateful for her participation in the early stages of the study. We also thank Ellen Tanouye and Ira Blake for their help in processing portions of the data for a preliminary version of this paper. We have benefited from discussions with Kathleen Fiess, Lorraine Harner, Lois Hood, Margaret Lahey, Michael Maratsos, Elissa Newport, Richard Sanders, Owen Whitby, and Richard Wojcik. Early reports of the results of the study were presented in 1977 to meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, the Canadian Linguistic Institute, the American Speech and Hearing Association, and in 1978 to the Symposium on Tense and Aspect, Brown University. Financial support for the research was provided by research grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health. 386 DEVELOPMENT OF VERB INFLECTION IN CHILD LANGUAGE 387 time, as a function only of events in the context. This implication is supported by results of the study reported here. There have been many and varied studies ofchildren's acquisition ofgrammatical morphemes. Most have been experimental, exploring children's knowledge of morphological rales for adding affixes to nonsense words, in the tradition of Berko 1958. Other studies have been observational (e.g. Brown, Cazden 1968, and de Villiers & de Villiers), describing correlations between use ofparticular morphemes and increase in utterance length. The implications of these studies are that the grammatical morphemes are learned sequentially, and apply in general to all of a child's verbs. These implications are not supported by the results of the present study. Brown (320) discussed the possibility that different verb inflections might be learned for different categories of verbs, e.g. 'process' and 'state' verbs; and Antinucci & Miller 1976 observed...

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