The transient use of perfective already in Cantonese-English bilingual children: Developmental asynchrony and typological incompatibility

Abstract

This study investigates the emergence of perfective aspect in Cantonese-English bilingual children through analyzing the corpus data of 9 bilingual children. As we observe, a range of developmental phenomena in Cantonese-English bilingual children are compatible with Heine and Kuteva’s (2005) model of contact-induced grammaticalization, a particularly interesting case being the novel use of already alongside uninflected verbs to mark perfective aspect, as in (1): (1)She wake already. ‘She has (already) woken up.’ (Sophie 2;06) The child usage differs from English in lacking the “contrary to expectation” reading normally associated with already (Soh 2009), illustrating semantic bleaching. We show that the adverbial already serves a function similar to that of the perfective marker Cantonese zo2 which appears as a suffix attached to the verb as in (2): (2) Keoi5 seng2-zo2 3SG wake-PFV ‘S/he has woken up.’ However, Cantonese constructions such as [V zo2...laa3] (3) may also serve as the models for the contact-induced grammaticalization of already, which may imply that the bilingual children do not use already as an exact equivalent of the Cantonese zo2 but also identify it with other particles such as laa3: (3) [To father] Lei5 sik6-zo2 laa3 2SG eat-PFV SFP ‘You’ve eaten (already).’ [To helper] He has eat already now. (Timmy 2;06) Two factors may have led to the emergence of perfective already in the bilingual children – first, the inflectional morphemes involved in the target-like English perfect form are incompatible with the isolating typology of Cantonese; second, the bilingual children’s development in the present perfect tense system shows at least a 6-month delay compared with their monolingual counterparts. Adopting a uniformitarian, evolutionary approach to language transmission (Mufwene 2001), we discuss why the perfective already is also commonly observed in contact languages, and why it eventually fades out at later stages of bilingual development. References Heine, B., & Kuteva, T. (2005). Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mufwene, S. S. (2001). The Ecology of Language Evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Soh, H. L. (2009). Speaker presupposition and Mandarin Chinese sentence-final -le: a unified analysis of the «change of state» and the «contrary to expectation » reading. Natural Language and Linguist Theory, 27, pp. 623-657.