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Abstract
This study contributes to the field of crosslinguistic research on the acquisition of tense and aspect by investigating the development of mechanisms of temporal reference in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit of arctic Quebec. Inuktitut is a polysynthetic language whose temporal system has a number of features which have not been a focus of acquisition research to date. Primary among these is its future-nonfuture opposition (part of a more general realis-irrealis opposition), which contrasts with the pervasive past-nonpast opposition characteristic of the languages previously studied in acquisition research. In addition, the temporal interpretation of verbs with no overt marking for tense, aspect, or modality depends on event structure properties. Investigation of how this feature of the target language develops in child language offers a novel perspective on the distributional patterns in early tense-aspect marking reported crosslinguistically. Inuktitut also has a rich morphological system for the expression of degrees of temporal remoteness, another temporal feature on which there is little acquisition research. The present study provides a detailed description of formal and functional aspects of these mechanisms of temporal reference in the speech of eight Inuit children acquiring Inuktitut as a first language between one and three-and-a-half years of age. The Inuktitut child speech data are compared with findings reported in the crosslinguistic literature and evaluated with regard to central issues in the acquisition of tense-aspect marking. Interestingly, some distributional patterns reported in the literature are supported by a language of such divergent typology. At the same time, this study shows that Inuit children first develop competence with future time marking rather than past time marking, in striking contrast with findings reported in the acquisition literature to date.
