The acquisition of time-aspect categories by children : a typological perspective

For almost forty years, the prevailing view in the study of children's acquisition of aspectual-temporal systems has emphasized the prominence of either the category of aspect, or that of "actionality"(Aktionsart), insofar as these two categories are conceived by researchers as clearly separate. In our presentation, we try to propose an alternative vision, which takes typological variation, i.e. the multifaceted morphological structure of languages, as its starting point. We therefore show how the specific structure of each language can influence the order of acquisition of categories relevant to the semantic domain under consideration, depending on the degree of explicitness with which they are made available to the child learner.