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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 and Antinucci & Miller 1976 observed...
Bloom et al. (Sun,) studied this question.