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A NOTE ON THE INFLECTION OF STATIVE AND
EVENTIVE VERBS IN CHILD ENGLISH
HAROLD TORRENCE
[email protected]
This study looks at the distribution of inflection types and how they related to the
eventivity of a verb. Root infinitives, present tense –s, present progressives, and present
participles were the subjects of investigation. It is found that there is a correlation
between the aspect and eventivity of a verb and the type of morphology that it will
appear with. A proposal is made that the data can be accounted for if root infinitives and
present tense –s forms are both taken to be specified for perfective aspect and present
progressives and bare present participles are specified for imperfective aspect.
1.1 INTRODUCTION
In this paper, I will be discussing the interpretations of verb forms in
child English (CE), or better, I will look at the aspectual nature of finite
and non-finite verb forms in CE. To do this, four verb kinds of verb
forms were taken into consideration: present tense –s forms, bare
verbs (often called “root infinitives” in the literature), present
progressives, and present participles(i.e. present progressives with ‘be’
omitted). Each of these is exemplified below (from files for Adam).
(1)
a. it has some water in it?
b. Daddy like shaving cream.
c. he’s screaming.
d. why he reading mail?
All of the examples above were produced by the same child at the same
age. As can be seen, he produced both finite and non-finite forms.
Thus, it cannot be said that the non-finite forms are used because the
relevant finite forms have not yet been acquired.
The data that I will discuss will show that –s forms and bare verbs
pattern alike on the one hand while progressives and bare participles
pattern alike on the other. These patterns will be explained in terms of
the aspectual values associated with the particular verbal “inflectional”
type.
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1.2 OVERVIEW OF FINITENESS PHENOMENA
As noted in Hoekstra and Hyams ((1998), henceforth “H&H”) and
Hyams (2000), cross-linguistically, non-finite verb forms are well
documented in child language. Consider the examples below from
Dutch, French, and German (from Hyams (op. cit.) (1)).
(2)
a. Papa schonen wassen
daddy shoes wash-infinitive
b. Michel pas
dormir
michel not sleep-infinitive
c. Auch Teddy fenster
gucken
also teddy window look-infinitive
For the languages above and others (e.g. Italian, Spanish), we know
that the non-finite verbs above are infinitives because they carry
infinitival morphology. Further, the infinitival status of the non-finite
verbs can be deduced from their positions in the clause. For French,
this is below negation and for German and Dutch, clause-finally. Note
that this is unlike the situation in CE where non-finite forms which
show the “to-infinitive” are unattested (Hyams (op. cit.)).
Infinitives are not the only non-finite forms found in child languages.
French, Italian, and Spanish (and CE (cf. (1)d above) also show bare
participles, i.e. participles without an auxiliary. Consider the example
from Italian below (= Hyams (op. cit.) (3a)). The rendering of (3a) in
adult Italian is in (3b).
(3)
a. presa Checco campana
taken francesco bell
“Francesco has taken the bell”
b. Francesco ha preso la campana
francesco has taken the bell
The table below (based on Hyams (op. cit.) attests to the robustness of
non-finite phenomena in child languages.
2
Table 1. Frequency of non-finite verb forms in some child languages
Type
Language
Frequency
# of
children
Age
Range
RI
RI
RI
Bare verb
Bare
participle
Bare
particple
French
German
Dutch
English
English
37%
43%
56%
78%
36.2%
3
1
4
3
4
1;8-2;6
2;1-2;2
1;8-2;4
1;6-3;0
2;0-3;2
Italian
32-36%
4
1;8-2;11
As Hyams notes, none of the frequencies is 100%. Thus, the non-finite
forms exist alongside the finite forms.
Root infinitives (RIs) are known to have characteristic properties
related to eventivity, mood, and tense. It has been observed
(Ferdinand(1996) for French, Wijnen (1996) for Dutch) that only
eventive verbs occur as root infinitives, while stative predicates ,
during the same period, are usually finite. H&H formalize these
observations as the Eventivity Constraint (EC), which says that RIs are
limited to eventive predicates. A second observation has been that RIs
almost always have a modal interpretation This, H&H call the Modal
Reference Effect (MRE). The modality of RIs is deontic or boulomaic.
H&H, Ud Deen (1997) and Madsen &Gilkerson (1999) report that the
situation in English, where as noted previously, bare verbs, but not
infinitives are found in the child language, is quite different. Neither
the EC nor the MRE seems to be operative in CE. Ud Deen (op. cit.)
found that 89% of the non-eventive verbs in his corpus were bare verbs
while Madsen and Gilkerson found that close to half (47%) of the noneventive verb tokens were bare verbs. This contrasts strongly with
Dutch where Wijnen (op. cit) found that only 5% of the non-eventive
verbs were RIs. With respect to the MRE, English is different too. Ud
Deen (op. cit.) found that only 13% of the bare verbs in his corpus had
a modal/future interpretation. Madsen and Gilkerson (op. cit.) found
that only 9% of the bare verbs had a modal/future interpretation, as
opposed to the 86% reported for Dutch RIs in Wijnen (op. cit.).
2. THE PRESENT STUDY
For the present study, I looked at ten files for Adam (3;0.10-3;5.0)
from the CHILDES database (Brown (1973), MacWhinney and Snow
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(1985)). I was only concerned with third person singular present tense
verbs because these are the only verb forms in English that regularly
distinguish person and number.
English verbs are potentially a good source of data on aspect because
they have interesting morpho-Semantic properties. Consider the adult
English examples below.
(4)
(5)
John has a dog.
John walks his dog.
Although both of the verbs in (4) and (5) are marked with the third
person singular present tense –s, the interpretations are not equivalent.
In (4), where the verb is stative, the simple present refers to the general
present, including the here and now. The sentence in (5), though,
cannot refer to the here and now. That is, eventive verbs in the simple
present denote habituality. Thus, (5) only has the meaning that John
walks his dog in the general present and cannot mean that he is
engaged in the act at the time of the utterance. This is unlike many
languages where eventive verbs with simple present tense marking can
be interpreted as ongoing at the time of utterance. Stative and eventive
verbs also contrast in the present progressive.
(6)
(7)
*John is having a dog.
John is walking his dog.
As (6) shows, the use of the present progressive with a stative verb
leads to ungrammaticality in the unmarked case. For eventive verbs
though (7), to express that the event is ongoing at the utterance time,
the present progressive is used. Thus, the semantic distinction between
eventive and stative verbs translates into a morphological contrast in
the present tense in English.
As for determining whether 3sg present tense verbs had a habitual or
ongoing interpretation, this was done by looking at the context of use
of particular instances of a verb. Thus, among the data, the following
utterances were found.
(8)
a.
b.
c.
d.
my nose always bleeds
Rocky like do that
it's make a loud noise
why he plays two of them ?
(28-11)
(23-34)
(22-3)
(30-21)
In the first example, determining that the -s form of the verb had a
habitual interpretation was straightforward. The presence of the adverb
always, which does not refer to ongoing events, indicates that the
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intended meaning is habitual. Further, the context of use helps here
too. Almost immediately after Adam utters (8a), his mother agrees and
says, "yes # your nose bleeds a lot." Importantly, Adam's nose is not
bleeding at the time (or better, there is nothing in the file to indicate
that it was.) The example in (8b) shows a case of a bare verb with a
habitual interpretation. The context here is one where Adam is
blinking his eyes and the researcher asks him, "who does that #
Adam?". He responds by saying, "you….Rocky"…."Rocky do like
that." Crucially, Rocky, a television character is not present nor is
there a television on (as far as can be determined from the context).
Thus, although Adam is blinking his eyes, Rocky is not. It appears that
he is describing a habit of Rocky. I counted an example like (8c) as a
case of a bare verb with an "ongoing" interpretation. This was because
the context was one where Adam was playing with a toy rocket and
making it blast off. He utters (8c) during these events. (On the status
of it's see below.) Finally, (8d) shows an example of an -s form with
an "ongoing" interpretation (thus, unlike the use of the -s form in adult
English). Here, the context was one where he and his mother were
talking about a toy bear with two drums. Adam asks his mother (8d)
and the mother responds by saying, "because he likes to." Adam says
that he wants to take "two" [sic] of the drums away because he only
wants the bear to play one of them. At the time, Adam is playing with
the bear and making it move around. Thus, it appears that the bear is
actually engaged in the act of playing the drums when Adam utters
(8d).
Verbs which were present tense in form but expressed future
tense/modality were put in the "uniterpretable" category. Some of
these are shown below.
(9)
a. where is [?] he going to skate[?]?
b. because # de number going to come off.
c. and dis man is going to burn de school down.
(24-8)
(25-25)
(30-28)
Sentences with present progressive or participle morphology, but
with future modality were not useful for this study because the
eventive/stative morphological distinctinction is neutralized in the
future. Thus, one can say "John is going to walk" and "John is going
to love Mary" with equal grammaticality , but not *“John is loving
Mary”. These constructions then tell us nothing about the
stative/eventive distinction in child English.
Although be is by far the most common verb, I left it out of the
calculations since in the vast majority of its occurences it is used as the
copula and therefore not useful for the present study. In any case,
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neither its present participle nor its infinitive appeared. Stative verbs
included those such as have, like, seem, fit, match, belong, etc."
There were also many instances of collocations which consisted of
it’s followed by a conjugated verb. Examples include those in (10)
below.
(10)
a. It's just went under
b. It's doesn't work
c. It's writes
(25-37)1
(25-37)
(26-5)
In these examples, I assumed that it’s was being used to mean it. This
certainly seems to be true in (10a) where the main verb went is in the
past tense. Given this, I counted cases like those in (10b) and (10c) as
just regular –s forms.
3. RESULTS
Table 2. Distribution of conjugation types for stative verbs
Total
Percentage
Bare Verb
67
44.4%
-s
76
50.3%
Progressive
62
4.0%
Participle
2
1.3%
Table 2 above shows the results for the stative verbs. It shows, for
example, that there were 67 occurrences of stative verbs as RIs.
Further, these accounted for 44.4% of all of the stative verbs in the
corpus. It is also worth noting that RIs and -S forms together account
for close to 95% of the occurrences of stative verbs. On the other
hand, statives appear as progressive or participle forms only 1.3% of
the time. Thus, the overwhelming majority of stative verbs occurred
with either no inflection at all (i.e. as bare verbs) or conjugated as in
adult English (i.e. with –s).
1
In all examples from the files, the first number indicates the file number and the second
number indicates the page on which the utterance is found within a file.
2
All of these involved “is going + Verb” and were thus future in meaning.
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Table 3. Distribution of conjugation types for eventive verbs
Total
Ongoing
% Category
Habitual
% Category
Uninterpret
% Category
% of Total
RI
72
9
12.5%
46
63.9%
17
23.6%
22.4%
-S
76
5
6.6%
54
71.1%
17
22.3%
23.7%
Progressive
49
37
75.5%
1
2.0%
11
22.4%
15.3%
Bare -Ing
124
75
60.5%
4
3.2%
42
33.9%
38.6%
Table 3 summarizes the results for eventive verbs. It shows, for
example, that there were seventy-Six occurrences of eventive verbs
with the -s ending. Five of these, representing 6.6% of the -s forms
(for eventive verbs), were used to refer to ongoing events (i.e. like
present progressives are used in adult English). Thus, these forms are
not possible in the adult grammar. Fifty-four occurences of the -s
forms, representing 71.1% of the total, were used to denote habitual
activities. These therefore conform to the adult grammar. Seventeen
of the -s forms are in the uninterpretable category .
It must be stressed that the results above only hold for a particular
stage of development for Adam. Ud Deen (cited in Hyams (op.
cit)),who looked at files for Adam from 2;3-3;5 and files for Eve from
1;6-1;11, found that bare eventive verbs had an ongoing interpretation
91% of the time (as compared to 9% in my data). Similarly, Madsen
and Gilkerson (op. cit.), looking at files for Naomi from 2;1-3;3 and
files for Nina from 2;4-2;9, found that 82% of the tokens for bare
eventive verbs referred to ongoing activities while only 26% of the
bare verbs referred to habitual activities. This made for a strong
contrast with the interpretation of –s forms in their study. Eventive
verbs in the –s form had a habitual reference 88% of the time and an
ongoing reference only 12% of the time. Since the data in the table
above show that bare verbs rarely refer to ongoing activities, it seems
that we are indeed dealing with two different developmental stages.
4. DISCUSSION
Together the data in the two tables reveal two major patterns. First,
progressive and participle forms pattern together for both stative and
eventive verbs. Second, bare verbs and –s forms pattern together for
both verbs types too. Thus, there are (at least) three questions that
need to be answered.
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(6)
a. Why do progressive and participle forms pattern
together?
b. Why do bare verbs and -S forms pattern together?
c. Why are there two different overall patterns?
With respect to the first question, the most straighforward answer is
that the participle forms represent be-deletion. This phenomenon is
known to be widespread in child English, although the rate of omission
is proportional to the type predicate (Becker (2000). This is equivalent
to saying that progressive and participle forms pattern together because
they are one and the same thing. The only difference between the two
is phonological. Of course, this does not tell us anything about why
the two major patterns occur, only why participle and progressive
pattern alike.
As with the pattern just discussed, it is reasonable that bare verb/-s
forms pattern together because they have some feature in common. I
will assume that they are identical in their aspectual specifications.
More precisely, I take bare verbs and –s forms to both be specified as
perfective. If this is the case, then we expect that these two forms will
pattern alike with respect to aspectual domains (all else being equal).
Aspect may be the key as to why there are two overall patterns. If we
further assume that progressive/participle forms are imperfective, then
the two patterns fall out. The reason why bare verbs and -S forms are
the most common inflection forms for stative verbs in that they are
perfective. States may be said to be homogeneous with respect to their
event structure. That is, they are not divisible into component stages.
Intuitively, perfective aspect may be said to obtain when an event is
seen as atomic. Imperfective aspect may be said to obtain when, from
the point of view of the speaker, an event is viewed as broken up or
divided into subparts. The morphology signalling perfective aspect is
–s and that of imperfective, -ing. Thus, we expect imperfective
morphology to be incompatible with inherently perfective verbs like
statives. Since bare verbs and -s forms are perfective, they are equally
compatible with stative verbs.
The pattern seen with eventive verbs also emerges straightforwardly
from these assumptions. Progressive/participleforms occur most often
with reference to ongoing events while bare verbs and –s forms rarely
do. This follows since an ongoing event is not perfective or
completed. Since progressive/participle forms are imperfective, they
are compatible with such a situtation. On the other hand, since bare
verb/-s forms are specified as perfective, they are incompatible with an
ongoing event. Similarly, it was noted that just the opposite situation
held with respect to habitual events. That is, bare verb/-s forms were
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used with overwhelming freqency, while progressive/participle forms
were used much less often. These facts mesh with the notion that bare
verb/-s forms are perfective if one thinks of habitual activity as a
characteristic property of the present and therefore denoting a state in
the way that a predicate like “be red” does. That is, habitual activities
are like states that are predicated of the present.3
With respect to the verb itself, we could argue that the verb is always
specified as perfective by default. In this scenario, the -ing may be said
to convert (or be the morphological reflex of converting) perfective
verbs to imperfective ones. This would explain why bare verbs express
perfective aspect. The reason why bare verbs appear in CE then
would be that CE has a morphological option, namely dropping -s,
which is unavailable in adult English. That English verbs may be
somehow inherently perfective is akin to the idea expressed in Giorgi
and Pianesi (2000) that English verbs are always associated with
feature bundles containing a [+perfective] value (among other things).
4. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, this pilot study set out to determine the interpretations
associated with finite and non-finite verb forms in child English. It
was seen that bare verbs and present tense verbs with -s pattern alike
and this was explained by their having identical aspectual values,
namely they are both perfective. Progressives and bare participles
were seen to pattern alike and this was explained by their both being
specified as imperfective. Many questions remain.
REFERENCES
BECKER, M. (2000). The Development of the Copula in Child
English: The Lightness of Be. PhD thesis, UCLA.
BROWN, R. 1973. A first language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
FERDINAND, A. 1996. The acquisition of the subject in French. PhD
thesis, HIL/Leiden University.
GIORIGI, A. and F. PIANESI. (1997). Tense and Aspect: From
Semantics to Morphosyntax. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
HOEKSTRA,T. and N. HYAMS. (1998). Aspects of root infinitives.
Lingua 106, 81-112.
3
I grant that this view of habitual activity is not what is normally assumed. By this I
mean that it is generally thought that habitual activities, because they are recurrent, are
imperfective. This view receives empirical support in that many languages use
imperfective verb forms for habitual activities.
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HYAMS, N. (2000). Finiteness, aspect and mood in early grammar:
A cross-linguistic perspective. UCLA manuscript.
MADSEN, S. and J. GILKERSON. (1999). A pattern of differences
between bare formsand root infinitives. UCLA manuscript.
MCWHINNEY, B. and C. SNOW. 1985. The child language exchange
system. Journal of Child Language, 12, 271-296.
UD DEEN, K. (1997). The interpretation of root infinitives in English:
is eventivity a factor? UCLA manuscript.
WIJNEN, F. 1996. Temporal reference and eventivity in root
infinitives. MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 12, 1-25.
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