Abstract
It has been claimed that there is a universal interaction between grammatical aspect and the inherent lexical aspect of verbs. In other words, in many languages of the world, a given grammatical aspect co-occurs naturally with some verb types but not with others. This chapter tests this claim with Brunei Malay and with children acquiring Brunei Malay as their L1 to determine whether or not the lexical aspect of verbs affects the comprehension of grammatical aspect. Although Brunei Malay is a language that does not have a grammaticalised system for marking tense, it has aspect markers available to its speakers. We identified five markers available in Brunei Malay namely sudah, baru, lakat, masih and tangah, and we tested children's comprehension of these aspect markers using sentence-to-picture matching exercises, and we looked specifically at the interaction of these aspect markers and the lexical aspect of the verbs. The participants were 108 children aged 3, 4 and 5. The findings suggest that the semantic features of verbs (like telicity or durativity) affect children’s comprehension of aspect markers and may be used to provide support for the Aspect Hypothesis.
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Aznah Suhaimi, Noor Azam Haji-Othman (2016). Comprehension of Aspect Markers by Brunei Malay L1 Learners. In: Noor Azam Haji-Othman, McLellan, J., Deterding, D. (eds) The Use and Status of Language in Brunei Darussalam. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0853-5_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0853-5_7
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