The Tense and Aspect acquisition: an investigation on the emergence of verbal structures and the influence of the semantic aspect on the grammatical aspect in the language acquisition process

This article presents the results of a research that aimed to verify the acquisition of verbal forms related to tense and aspect, demonstrating the results of an investigation carried out after the study of the emergence of verbal structures (in simple form and in periphrastic form - auxiliary and main verb) effectively produced by five monolingual children, between 2 years old and 5 years and 11 months old, in the process of language acquisition. The corpus used was cataloged by two members of the eLinC group - Studies in Language and Cognition (in press). The objective was to understand, in addition, to what extent the notions of semantic/lexical aspect influence or not on the appearance of grammatical aspect marks. This work has two hypotheses: (i) in children's grammar, the notion of aspect appears, more recurrently, before the notion of tense and (ii) when the verbal forms in the present tense and in the perfect past tense appear, the aspect is expressed. Based on qualitative analyses, we understand that the aspect is a category that appears before tense, but, even so, younger children present the tense category in their spontaneous productions, which is in line with what the Generative Theory advocates, which is the theoretical framework adopted to carry out this research.