Part of
The Acquisition of the PresentEdited by Dalila Ayoun
[Not in series 196] 2015
► pp. 21–56
Chapter 2. Zero-present under past in child French
Evidence from the future
This chapter discusses novel data from two experimental studies testing the acquisition of futurity and providing evidence in favor of Demirdache and Lungu’s (2009, 2011) zero-tense hypothesis, according to which child grammars display both zero-present and zero-past tenses, alongside indexical present/past tenses. Extending Kratzer (1998), Demirdache and Lungu argue that simultaneous construals of past/present in adult languages arise via a zero-tense analysis of the embedded tense. The claim is that while some adult languages (English, French) allow zero-tense construals of past and others (Japanese) allow zero-tense construals of present, child French in particular and, by hypothesis, child language in general, allows zero-tense construals of both past and present. We argue that once we admit the existence of a zero-present tense in child French, we expect children to allow non-adult, non-indexical construals of other tenses that have a present component. On the basis of two experiments testing the interpretation of futurity in L1 French, we show that this prediction is borne out.
References
Abusch, D.
1988 Sequence of tense, intensionality and scope. In Proceedings of the 7th West Coast Conference for Formal Linguistics (WCCFL 7), H. Borer (ed.), 1–14. Stanford CA: CSLI.
1994 Sequence of tense revisited: Two semantic accounts of tense in intensional contexts. In Ellipsis, Tense and Questions. DYANA-2, H. Kamp (ed.), 87–139. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
1997 Sequence of tense and temporal de re. Linguistics and Philosophy 20: 1–50. 
Altshuler, D.
2008 Narrative effects in Russian indirect reports and what they reveal about the meaning of the past tense. In Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory (SALT 18), T. Friedman & S. Ito (eds), 19–36. Ithaca NY: CLC Publications.
Ayoun, D.
2003 Parameter Setting in Language Acquisition. London: Continuum.
Copley, B.
2009 The Semantics of the Future. New York NY: Routledge.
Crain, S. & Thornton, R.
1998 Investigations in Universal Grammar: A Guide to Experiments on the Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics. Cambridge MA: The MIT Press.
De Saussure, L.
2011 Le passé composé en usage futur et la pertinence au present. Journal of French language studies 22(2): 189–206.
2012 Remarques sur l’usage futur du passé composé. Revue Tranel 51: 45–60.
Demirdache, H. & Lungu, O.
2009 Sequence of tense in (French) child language. In Linguistic Variation Yearbook 8, J. van Craenenbroeck & J. Rooryck (eds), 101–131. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
2011 Zero-tense vs. indexical construals of the present in French L1. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Tense Across Languages, R. Musan & M. Rathert (eds), 233–256. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Dowty, D.
1979 Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Enç, M.
1987 Anchoring conditions for tense. Linguistic Inquiry 18: 633–657.
Grønn, A. & von Stechow, A.
2011 Future vs. present in Russian and English adjunct clauses. Scando-Slavica 57(2): 245–267.
Han, C, Lidz, J. & Musolino, J.
2007 V-raising and grammar competition in Korean: Evidence from negation and quantifier scope. Linguistic Inquiry 38(1): 1–47.
Heim, I.
1994 Comments on Abusch's theory of tense. In Ellipsis, Tense and Questions, H. Kamp (ed.), 143–170. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.
Heim, I. & Kratzer, A.
1998 Semantics in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.
Hollebrandse, B.
2000 The Acquisition of Sequence of Tense. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Kaufmann, S.
2005 Conditional truth and future reference. Journal of Semantics 22: 231–280.
Khomitsevich, O.
2008 Dependencies across Phases: From Sequence of Tense to Restrictions on Movement. PhD dissertation, University of Utrecht.
Kratzer, A.
1998 More structural analogies between pronouns and tenses. In Proceedings of the 8th Annual Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory, D. Strolovitch & A. Lawson (eds), 92–110. Ithaca NY: CLC Publications.
Kroch, A.
1989 Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Language Variation and Change 1: 199–244.
Kusumoto, K.
1999 Tense in Embedded Contexts. PhD dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
Lewis, D.
1979 Attitudes de dicto and de se. The Philosophical Review 88: 513–543.
Lungu, O.
2008 Tense in embedded contexts: The case of Romanian. In Bucharest Working Papers in Linguistics X(1), A. Cornilescu (ed.), 21–37. Bucharest: University of Bucharest.
2012 Tense in Embedded Contexts: The View from (French) Child Language. PhD dissertation, Université de Nantes.
Lungu, O. Submitted
The embedded present in Romanian: An issue of (non)commitment.
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Tense, Aspect and Modality (CHRONOS 9)
.
Matsuo, A. & Hollebrandse, B.
1999 The acquisition of sequence of tense in Japanese. In Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Child Development (BUCLD 23), A. Greenhill, H. Littlefield & C. Tano (eds), 431–442. Somerville MA: Cascadilla Press.
Ogihara, T.
1989 Temporal Reference in English and Japanese. PhD dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.
1996 Tense, Attitudes and Scope. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Ogihara, T. & Sharvit, Y.
2012 Embedded tenses. In The Oxford Handbook of Tense and Aspect, R. Binnick (ed.), 638–668. Oxford: OUP.
Partee, B.
1973 Some structural analogies between tenses and pronouns in English. The Journal of Philosophy 70(18): 601–609.
Percus, O. & Lungu, O.
2011 Simultaneous analyses for simultaneous present. In Proceedings of the 20th Annual Conference on Semantics and Linguistics Theory [SALT 20], N. Li & D. Lutz (eds), 735–755. Ithaca NY: CLC Publications.
Roeper, T.
1999 Universal bilingualism. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 2: 169–186.
Schmeißer, M.
2014 Present last. Production-comprehension asymmetries in the acquisition of tense in monolingual French and Italian. Ms, Bergische Universität Wuppertal.
Smith, C.
2009 The temporal reference of the English futurate. In Text, Time and Context. Selected Papers of Carlota. S. Smith, R.P. Meier, H. Aristar-Dry & E. Destruel (eds), 147–160. Dordrecht: Springer.
Stowell, T.
2007 The syntactic expression of tense. Lingua 117: 437–463.
Taylor, A.
1994 The change from SOV to SVO in ancient Greek. Language Variation and Change 6: 1–37.
Valian, V.
1991 Syntactic subjects in the early speech of American and Italian children. Cognition 40: 21–82.
Vet, C.
1999 Le passé simple, le passé composé et les règles d’interprétation discursive. In L’emprise du sens, structures linguistiques et interpretations, M. Plénat, M. Aurnague, A. Condamines, J.-P. Maurel, C. Molinier & C. Muller (eds), 323–336. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
2001 Deux cas de polysémie: Le passé composé et le futur périphrastique. In Langage et référence, mélanges offerts à Kerstin Jonasson à l’occasion de ses soixante ans, H. Kronning, C. Norén, B. Novén, G. Ransbo, L.-G., Sundell & B. Svane (eds), 697–686. Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.
von Stechow, A.
1995 On the proper treatment of tense. In Proceedings of the 5th Annual Conference on Semantics and Linguistic Theory, M. Simons & T. Galloway (eds), 362–386. Ithaca NY: CLC Publications.
2003 Feature deletion under semantic binding: tense, person, and mood under verbal quantifiers. In Proceedings of the 33th Meeting of the North Eastern Linguistic Society, M. Kadowaki, S. Kawahara (eds), 397–403. Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts.
2009 Tenses in compositional semantics. In The Expression of Time, W. Klein & P. Li (eds), 129–166. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Yang, C.
2000 Knowledge and Learning in Natural Language
. PhD dissertation, MIT.
2011 Computational models of language acquisition. In Handbook of Generative Approaches to Language Acquisition, J. de Villiers & T. Roeper (eds), 119–154. Dordrecht: Springer.