A NOTE ON THE INFLECTION OF STATIVE AND EVENTIVE VERBS IN CHILD ENGLISH

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1 A NOTE ON THE INFLECTION OF STATIVE AND EVENTIVE VERBS IN CHILD ENGLISH HAROLD TORRENCE 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. 1

2 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

3 Table 1. Frequency of non-finite verb forms in some child languages Type Language Frequency # of children Age Range RI French 37% 3 1;8-2;6 RI German 43% 1 2;1-2;2 RI Dutch 56% 4 1;8-2;4 Bare verb English 78% 3 1;6-3;0 Bare English 36.2% 4 2;0-3;2 participle Bare particple 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 3

4 (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) John has a dog. (5) 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) *John is having a dog. (7) 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. my nose always bleeds (28-11) b. Rocky like do that (23-34) c. it's make a loud noise (22-3) d. why he plays two of them? (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 4

5 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[?]? (24-8) b. because # de number going to come off. (25-25) c. and dis man is going to burn de school down. (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, 5

6 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 (25-37) 1 b. It's doesn't work (25-37) c. It's writes (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 Bare Verb -s Progressive Participle Total Percentage 44.4% 50.3% 4.0% 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. 6

7 Table 3. Distribution of conjugation types for eventive verbs RI -S Progressive Bare -Ing Total Ongoing % Category 12.5% 6.6% 75.5% 60.5% Habitual % Category 63.9% 71.1% 2.0% 3.2% Uninterpret % Category 23.6% 22.3% 22.4% 33.9% % of Total 22.4% 23.7% 15.3% 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. 7

8 (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 8

9 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 A first language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. FERDINAND, A 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, 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. 9

10 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 The child language exchange system. Journal of Child Language, 12, UD DEEN, K. (1997). The interpretation of root infinitives in English: is eventivity a factor? UCLA manuscript. WIJNEN, F Temporal reference and eventivity in root infinitives. MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics 12,