Semantics of Verbs and the Development of Verb Inflection in Child Language

The longitudinal emergence of verb inflections ( -ing, -s , and - ed /IRREG) was observed in the spontaneous speech of four 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.