Verifying the Aspect Hypothesis: A Tamil language study comparing child data with adult data

This study explores the validity of the aspect hypothesis with regards to the Tamil language. Aspect meaning is an element of verb mechanics that refers to the way in which a verb’s action is distributed through the space-time continuum (Harrison, 1996-2002:1). My research aims to test whether adult native speakers of Tamil are influenced by the inherent semantic aspect of verbs when they use aspect and tense markers. These results will be evaluated against data obtained from similar experiments conducted with children learning Tamil as their first language. (Shirai & Anderson, 1994: 133). Studies in English, French, Spanish and Italian in first language acquisition studies support the aspect hypothesis in that they have shown that children associate past and perfective inflections with achievement and accomplishment verbs, while progressive and imperfective inflections are strongly associated with durative verbs (Shirai & Anderson, 1994:135). But data from a range of non-European languages is urgently needed so that the aspect hypothesis can be validated in a more concrete way. Tamil, one of the oldest Dravidian languages, would make an interesting study because it uses separate linguistic devices to code distinctions between both tense and aspect. The fact that aspect marking is not obligatory in Tamil, but that the marking of tense is, also makes important predictions for the aspect hypothesis.

 

The results from the study of adult native speakers of Tamil from Singapore who are of the same age and who speak the same variety of Tamil will be compared with data from a similar study conducted with Tamil children from Singapore aged between four and seven. The aspectual markers used in my tests are ‘iru’, ‘vidu’ and ‘kondiru’. ‘iru’ is an auxiliary that expresses the perfect or the progressive aspect depending on what the situation type of the main verb is (Lehmann, 1993: 205). ‘kondiru’ marks the progressive aspect (Annamalai, 1997: 57), while ‘vidu’, when inflected for the past tense, expresses the perfective aspect (Saeed, 1997: 121). These markers have been integrated into a comprehension task, a production task and an imitation task. By examining and consolidating data from these different performance modalities, it is possible to draw a comprehensive picture of which aspectual and tense markers interact with which verb types in the variety of Tamil spoken by Singaporean adults and children.

References

Annamalai, E. (1997). Adjectival Clauses in Tamil. Published by: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA). Tokyo: Tokyo University of Foreign Studies.

 

Harrison, Richard K. (1996 – 2002). Verb Aspect. In Journal of Planned Languages. 24 th edition. pp 1 – 8. http://www.rick.harrison.net/langlab/aspect.html.