Thursday 25 August 2011

"Tomorrow, after we got on the boat ..." (Past morphology as anterior))

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.