Reading Working Papers in Linguistics 4 (2000) - The University of ...

The emergence of Tense and Agreement in Kuwaiti
children speaking Arabic
Khawla Aljenaie
Department of Linguistic Science, The University of Reading
Abstract. This paper investigates the emergence of tense and agreement in
Kuwaiti Arabic (KA). Arabic is a highly inflected language and FCs are
highly parameterized. Tense has a regular paradigm of person, gender, and
number formatives. The discussion is set in the context of Chomsky’s
principles and parameter model of Universal Grammar (UG). According to
Chomsky, parameterization is limited to Functional heads like Comp
(complementizer), Inf (inflection), and Det (determiner). There is debate over
the availability of UG. On one hand, the Continuity Hypothesis claims that all
principles of UG are available from the start. On the other hand, Maturation
Hypothesis asserts that UG principles emerge according to an innately
specified maturation schedule. A study of morphosyntactic development in
KA should provide: interesting insight into acquisition and development of
KA; a test of whether UG principles are available to Kuwaiti children from
the earliest stages; a study of the pattern of appearance and development of
tense and agreement in Kuwaiti children. Two Kuwaiti children (age range
2;0-2;6) were audio recorded in free speech setting (45 minutes session
fortnightly). The analysis was run in SALT (Systematic Analysis of Language
Transcript, Miller & Chapman, 1993). The results reveal a variety of distinct
inflections from the earliest recording and development is rather gradual.
Within the tense paradigm, present is the most extensively represented.
Individual differences are noted across the two paradigms and within the
same morphological paradigm.
1. Introduction
Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar (UG) has stimulated both
psycholinguists and linguists to search for rules of grammar that explain a
child’s acquisition and development of language. The question that
evokes debate is “when do principles of UG become available to the
child?” A variety of positions emerge in the recent literature. There are
two distinct hypotheses, the Continuity Hypothesis and the Maturation
Hypothesis. The former postulates that all principles of UG are available
to the child from the start (Pinker 1984). The latter claims that UG
principles emerge according to an innately specified maturation schedule
(Borer & Wexler 1987; Radford 1990; Wexler 1990). These hypotheses
are established on only a few languages, and thus Arabic provides a useful
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