Working within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar, we will examine how the semantic structure of predicates guides the acquisition of verb morphology, and how predicate structures are mapped onto syntactic structures. We refer to the basic methodology of this project as "predicate tracking". Utilizing tests of lexical aspect, we identify different types of predicates within the child's lexicon, e.g., activities versus accomplishments, and we trace the emergence of their tense/aspect and agreement morphology. For each predicate, we determine the history of the emergence of minimal morphological pairs. We intend to base this analysis on existing data from children learning Polish and English that are found in the CHILDES archives.
Based on our pilot research, we anticipate the following outcomes: 1) The precise pattern in the acquisition of tense/aspect morphology will be different for telic, e.g., to fall, versus atelic, to play, predicates demonstrating the fundamental role of semantic structure. Hence, we expect to find that the acquisition of the inflectional system is not an autonomous syntactic phenomenon. 2) We expect to find that tense is likely to be productive prior to viewpoint aspect, and that this pattern will be more pronounced in English than Polish. A tense-aspect sequence would constitute an anomaly for the genetic programming of the prototypical X-bar structure and the application of the economy principle. 3) In Polish, where finite and non-finite forms are morphologically distinct, we expect that infinitives will be found in complex sentence constructions of the form (I want) +verb+INF, i.e., they will not be optional. 4) In Polish, there is agreement in person and number across the tenses, and it is possible to determine if the acquisition pattern exhibits a "piecemeal" or an "across-the-board" trend. Finally, we intend to evaluate the relationship between predicate structure and agreement as a means of determining the nature of the concept of subject in child language.
