De Verwerving van Temporele Referentie in het Turks Door Kinderen in de Leeftijd van 4 Tot 7 Jaar

The diversity of finite tense/aspect/modality markers in Turkish means, firstly, that the functional load for each of them is more restricted than in western European languages, and secondly that for certain discourse types specific forms are usually selected. Thus these forms may constitute rather transparant morphological indicators for the semantics of separate utterances. A case in point are descriptions of scenes (such as picture descriptions) which are based on a simple binary tense/aspect-opposition (pres.tense +Iyor for action): (perfect +mIş for states). Stones about happenings in the past on the other hand tend to centre around the opposition (neutral +DI):(imperfective [durative +Iyordu]: [iterative +()rdI]).In the paper the patterns of acquisition of these oppositions in the speech of children growing up in the Netherlands is analyzed on the basis of picture descriptions and interviews.In the picture descriptions it was found that the 4-year-old kinder-garteners frequently used +DI where one would expect + mIs in adult language. This form has almost completely disappeared in the descrip-tions by the 5-year-old children. Frequent marking with +DI reappears in the descriptions by the 7-year-olds; with them, however, the use of the +DI-forms are not a sign for the lack of differentiation from +mIs but rather reflect the fact that the pictures offered for descrip-tion were sequences: by this age the children are aware that the pictures in fact are not merely separate scenes so that they connect them with +DI-forms, mostly together with the conjunction (ondan) sonra "and then". The same acquisitional pattern is reflected in the data from two control groups of children growing up in Turkey. This is interpreted as resulting from the lack of morpho-syntactic difficulties involved: the acquisitional pattern quite directly reflects the development of cognitive skills.