Aspects of the Acquisition of (Past) Tense and (Telic) Aspect in Turkish and Korean

Abstract

This paper examines the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in thirty children acquiring Turkish and three children acquiring Korean. It was found that (1) both Korean and Turkish children use first past marking predominantly with accomplishment and achievement verbs, (2) those children (Korean and Turkish) frequently use the verbs which involve telicity in their past references and (3) Turkish children start using adverbs predominantly with accomplishment verbs. The acquisition of past markers shows similarity crosslinguistically. Therefore, the universality of the phenomenon must be related to a general theory of tense/aspect systems. The results show that the pattern of the development should be attributed either to children's sensitivity to the prominent final phase of result right after the telic point in aspect and/or prototype formation by children and to a certain extent to input.