Root infinitives in child second language English: an aspectual features account

Elena Gavruseva (1)

1 University of Iowa [Iowa City]

This article examines the emergence of finiteness in early second language (L2) English of five consecutive bilinguals (ages 6 to 9). The departure point is Gavruseva's (2002; 2003) proposal that nonfinite root predicates result from the underspecification of syntactic aspectual heads at the initial state S. Gavruseva's ‘underspecification of AspP' account is developed further by examining the feature contents of aspectual projections in English from a crosslinguistic perspective. It is argued that English, in contrast to Russian and French, lacks the genuine imperfective and perfective morphemes and so makes use of a greater variety of aspectual features (e.g., intrinsic and compositional telicity features, ). It is also proposed that an English verb's telicity semantics defines its aspectual class and predicts its finiteness status in children's early grammar. An advantage of the ‘aspectual features account' is that it explains why statives (inherent atelics) and punctual eventives (inherent telics) show much higher finiteness rates than nonpunctual eventives (an aspectual class defined by a compositional telicity feature) in the child L2 data. Other approaches to the root infinitive phenomenon such as the (Rizzi 1993=94) and the (Haznedar and Schwartz, 1997; Lardiere, 1998; Prévost and White, 2000) cannot explain these finiteness patterns.

Mots clés: Social Sciences & Humanities

Elena Gavruseva. Root infinitives in child second language English: an aspectual features account. Second Language Research, 2004, 20 (4), pp.335-371. ⟨10.1191/0267658304sr244oa⟩. ⟨hal-00572076⟩