Progressive aspect in child L2 English

Tania Ionin | University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | University of Southern California

This paper investigates the use of -ing forms and bare verb forms in progressive contexts in cross-sectional data of L1-Russian L2-English children. It is proposed that child L2-learners are guided by the Uniqueness Principle (cf. Wexler & Culicover 1980; Pinker 1989; Clark 1987; among others), which leads them to restrict -ing forms to progressive contexts and bare verb forms to non-progressive contexts. The acquisition of progressive interpretation is furthermore shown to be independent of the acquisition of finiteness morphology. It is suggested that child L2-learners follow a developmental path similar to that of child L1-learners, but that, unlike L1-learners, they may also be influenced by L1-transfer.

Published online: 09 July 2008
https://doi.org/10.1075/lald.46.03ion

Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Ballester, Elizabet Pladevall

2012. Child L2 English acquisition of subject properties in an immersion bilingual context. Second Language Research 28:2 ► pp. 217 ff.

Han, Weifeng

2020. In Universal Grammar and the Initial State of Second Language Learning [SpringerBriefs in Education, ], ► pp. 49 ff.

Haznedar, Belma

2013. Child second language acquisition from a generative perspective. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 3:1 ► pp. 26 ff.

Murakami, Akira & Theodora Alexopoulou

2016. L1 INFLUENCE ON THE ACQUISITION ORDER OF ENGLISH GRAMMATICAL MORPHEMES. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 38:3 ► pp. 365 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 01 july 2022. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.