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Semantics in Language Acquisition
Edited by Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam
[Trends in Language Acquisition Research 24] 2018
► pp. 124–150

Chapter 6
Telicity in typical and impaired acquisition

| Goethe-University Frankfurt

This chapter discusses children’s knowledge of the syntactic-semantic interface of different types of telicity in typical and impaired acquisition. It maintains that telicity can be semantic or pragmatic, depending on whether event completion is entailed or implicated. It further delineates the Event Structural Bootstrapping account, arguing that Endstate Orientation – rather than a Manner Bias – guides children’s acquisition of verb meanings. Findings from studies testing German-speaking children’s early verb production and comprehension are provided as evidence for a strong Endstate Orientation in typical development, but not in Specific Language Impairment. These data speak for modularity in the domain of semantics and for the presence of selective impairments in verb semantics. Cross-linguistic implications for further research are formulated in the conclusion.

Keywords: telicity, Specific Language Impairment (SLI), typical language development, comprehension, German, semantic impairment, verb (particle), verb semantics, event structural bootstrapping, Endstate Orientation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Semantic and pragmatic construal of telicity
    • 2.1Event structure of verbs
    • 2.2Encoding telicity in German: A note on verb particles and particle verbs
    • 2.3Inherent and compositional telicity
  • 3.The acquisitional perspective
    • 3.1The acquisition task of mastering telicity
    • 3.2Learning strategy for verbs: Event Structural Bootstrapping
    • 3.3Predictions for the acquisition of German
  • 4.Telicity in production
  • 5.Telicity in comprehension
    • 5.1A note on children with SLI and semantic deficits
    • 5.2Inherent telicity
      • 5.2.1Inherent telicity: The case of particle verbs
      • 5.2.2Difficulty with inherently telic verbs: Result of a general lexical deficit?
      • 5.2.3Difficulty with inherently telic verbs: Just a matter of experimental method?
      • 5.2.4Inherent telicity: Interim summary
    • 5.3Compositional telicity
      • 5.3.1Strong telicity markers
      • 5.3.2Weak telicity markers
  • 6.Conclusion and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 2 August 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/tilar.24.06sch
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