Recently, I've been posting some of Julian's more interesting grammatical misanalyses. Most of them have been lexical, but the one that I've noticed recently is syntactic and really quite frequent. Julian's 5;2 now, and typically adult-like by most measures, except for some lexical misanalyses, and morphological overgeneralizations of various kinds, especially perfective/passive.
He generally has control of past/non-past and can correctly distinguish preterite/present perfect in production of main clauses. All the more surprising then that he uses preterite forms in adverbial clauses to designate future perfect. So, for example:
"Tomorrow, after we came back from the doctors, can we go on our bikes?"
"Next week, when we got back from Ireland, can I play with Isaac?"
As far as I can judge, all when-(before/after/as soon as) clauses with future reference, where the topic time is further in the future—i.e. future perfect clauses—contain a preterite form.
(This is just like Vietnamese anterior da, except of course, that Julian does not speak or hear Vietnamese. It's not a feature of his other L1 (Japanese), either)
If anyone has similar data, perhaps you could let me know.
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)