The Semantics of Verbs and the Development of Verb Inflections in Child Language

The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between the semantic organization of verbs used in early sentences and the emergence of the inflections of the verb auxiliary (-ing, -s, -ed, irreg). In discussions of the acquisition of grammatical morphemes by Brown (1973), de Villiers & de Villiers (1973), and others, only the syntax and semantics (along with environmental frequency) of the individual morphemes themselves have been seriously discussed as contributing to the order in which they are acquired. However, the results of the present study suggest that the semantic organization of the verb system that children learn is at least as important as the meanings of the verb inflections for determining their acquisition. There have been few studies of the semantics of verbs in children’s early sentences. Bloom, Lightbown, and Hood (1975) described developmental differences between verbs of action and state, and between locative and nonlocative actions and states. Bloom, Miller, and Hood (1975) extended the categorization of locative verbs and described three semantic-syntactic categories of locative verbs that differed according to the relationship between a verb and its pre-verb and post-verb constituents (subject-verb and verb-complement). Bowerman (1974) used ‘error’ data to describe the emergence of causative verbs in her 2-year-old daughter’s language. The implication of these studies is that children learn the verbs of the language as a system and that verbs do not enter children’s vocabularies one at a time, as a function only of events in the context. This implication is supported by results of the study reported here. There have been many and varied studies of children’s acquisition of grammatical morphemes. Most have been experimental, exploring children’s knowledge of morphological rules for adding affixes to nonsense words, in the tradition of Berko (1958). Other studies have been observational (e.g., Brown, 1973; Cazden, 1968; and de Villiers & de Villiers, 1973), describing correlations between use of particular morphemes and increase in utterance length. The implications of these studies are that the grammatical morphemes are learned sequentially and apply in general to all of a child’s verbs. However, these implications are not supported by the results of the present study. Brown (1973) discussed the possibility that different verb inflections might be learned for different categories of verbs, for example, ‘process’ and ‘state’ verbs. Antinucci and Miller (1976) observed that past tense first appears only with certain verbs in the acquisition of Italian and English. In experimental studies of Frenchspeaking children by Bronckart and Sinclair (1973) and of American English-speaking children by Harner (1981) and Smith (1978), event aspect influenced the inflections that children used in describing actions in elicited production tasks. After a description of the subjects and procedures for the present observational study, the emergence of verb inflections in the children’s sentences will be described. These results will then be discussed in terms of (1) the 1The research reported here was supported by Fellowship F1-MH-30,001, 1965-1968, from the National Institute of Mental Health; Research Grant HD 03828, 1971-1974, from the National Institute of Child Health and Development; and Research Grants from the National Science Foundation, 1975-1981, to Lois Bloom. The study was published originally in Language, 56, 386-412; reprinted in Bloom, L. (1991). Language development from two to three, New York: Cambridge University, pp. 210-237; and reformatted for this digital version with slight changes in organization and minor text editing.