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.
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2 comments:
Are you sure there's no Japanese influence? My daughter Grace has done this kind of thing, though not recently (she's now 6;0). I always attributed it to: ashita kaetTAra, Isaac-kun-to issho asonde ii?
--John
You're right John, I think: there's a general consensus (from Suzy and Kayo) that this is Japanese influence. My own Japanese is so poor that I don't pick up on this non-salient inflection.
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