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Temporal comprehension in child Spanish
Amy Pratt and John Grinstead
Ohio State University (USA)
In Giorgi & Pianesi’s (1997) analysis of tense in Southern Romance, they argue that the temporal
properties of the present in languages like Spanish are not represented in the morphosyntax but
rather are resolved at LF as the unmarked or elsewhere case. In Giorgi & Pianesi (1997) it is
assumed, following Reichenbach (1947), that simultaneous speech, event and reference time is the
unmarked temporal value and that a segmentally distinct present tense morphological paradigm will
be found in a language only when the present tense corresponds a value other than this unmarked
one. They present as evidence for this position, for example, the fact that languages which lack a
copular verb in predicative constructions, such as Russian or Latin, only lack the copula in the
present and not in the past or the future.
If this view is correct, then children's optional infinitive Southern Romance grammars should
allow nonfinite forms (which presumably have simultaneous S, E and R times) in present tense
contexts, where there is no clash between the temporal interpretation of nonfinite morphosyntactic
forms and the unmarked temporal value of the present, while in the past, the absence of past tense
morphosyntactic features in children's nonfinite forms should clash with the past temporal value.
This predicts that children should interpret "Yo correr ayer." (I run-inf. yesterday.) and "Yo corre
ayer." (I run-bare_form yesterday.) as ungrammatical more often than they should the same forms
in a present tense context, as in "Yo correr ahora." (I run-inf. now.). and "Yo corre ahora." (I
runbare_form now.). These two nonfinite forms are attested in child Spanish in both spontaneous
speech (Hernández-Pina 1984, Clahsen, Aveledo & Roca 2002, Radford & Ploennig-Pacheco 1995)
and in elicited production (Bedore & Leonard 2001, 2005).
To test this prediction, we carried out a grammaticality judgment task (cf. Cairns & McDaniel
1990), which presented twenty 4 and 5 year-old monolingual child Spanish speakers with forms that
were either well-formed or ill-formed with respect to subject-verb agreement, while viewing images
in which characters carried out actions in either a present or a past context. The children's responses
showed that they were significantly more likely to reject tense and agreement mismatches in the
past than they were in the present (t (20) = 2.39, p < 0.02).
Our results are evidence that infinitive and 3rd singular present bare forms do not lack a
temporal specification in child Spanish grammars. These results suggest the need for modifying
current theories of developmental syntax which assume that child speakers of Southern Romance do
not produce nonfinite forms as a grammatical option (e.g. the Agreement and Tense Omission
Model [ATOM] of Schütze 1997, Schütze & Wexler 1996a, Wexler 1998). Further, they support
models of adult morphosyntactic tense (e.g. Giorgi & Pianesi 1997), which hold that the temporal
properties of the present in Romance are not spelled out in the morphosyntax but rather are resolved
at LF as the unmarked or elsewhere case.
References
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