Manners and Goals in Pre-Linguistic Thought: The Origins of Aspectual Construal

There are a handful of semantic concepts that serve an organizing function within the grammar. The over-arching goal of this research program is to examine the conceptual origins of these concepts (cf. Wagner & Lakusta, in press): To what extent is the infant mind specially prepared to acquire the natural semantics of language? One of these core concepts is Aspect, and the specific goal of this study is to examine the pre-linguistic representations that might support aspect semantics. More specifically, the particular dimension of aspect being investigated is that of TELICITY. Telicity is a feature of predicates: Telic predicates describe events with inherent endings (I ran to the store); Atelic predicates describe events without such endings (I ran). Across languages, there are a variety of syntactic reflexes that follow from a predicate’s aspectual value (telic or atelic), including argument structure, auxiliary and adverb selection, and case marking (see Dowty 1979, Smith 1991, and Klein 1994 for further discussion). However, no languages have a morpheme that directly signals the telicity of a predicate. In their early language use, children seem to use telicity to guide their choice of morphology. In particular, children tend to restrict their use of tense and grammatical aspect markers as a function of the telicity of the predicate, preferentially applying past and perfective markers to telic predicates and applying present and imperfective markers to atelic predicates (see Li & Shirai 2000 and Wagner in press for an overview of this phenomenon). Thus, telicity appears to be a semantic distinction that children expect will be important in their linguistic system. Putting it more strongly, telicity appears to be a natural linguistic category for children, and further, may also be a natural category in children’s cognition. It might be the case, therefore, that even before infants can command the linguistic tools of aspect, they may still nonetheless analyze events in the same