Time in child Inuktitut: A developmental study of an Eskimo-Aleut language (review)

Most studies of child language acquisition up till now have focused on Indo-European or the major languages of East Asia. An investigation of how children master the typologically very different structure of a language such as Inuktitut is therefore of considerable theoretical interest.

This book describes how children up to the age of three and a half acquire the mechanisms of time reference in the Tarramiut (Hudson Strait) subdialect of Inuktitut, a language spoken by about fifteen hundred Inuit in arctic Quebec. Introductory chapters describe the tense-aspect-mood system of adult Inuktitut, and survey what is known crosslinguistically about how TAM morphology is acquired in early childhood. The data analyzed derive from corpora collected from eight children for two previous studies: Cultural context in communicative interaction of young Inuit children by Martha Crago (Montreal: McGill University dissertation, 1988) and Aspects of argument structure acquisition in Inuktitut by Shanley Allen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996). Note that S investigates the acquisition of a different facet of language structure from these earlier studies. Her description of the verb morphology in adult Tarramiut is also important, given the lack of any comparable overview. Publications on related aspects of Inuktitut grammar or other Inuit dialects are surveyed briefly on pp. 8–11.

The last six chapters document how young children learning Inuktitut as a native language master increasingly more complex tense-aspect structures. The first verb forms acquired are zero-marked for tense-aspect. Among these, telic verbs tend to be used to express past completed events, while atelic verbs express present ongoing events. S shows how children later add suffixes marking viewpoint aspect, as well as suffixes marking degrees of temporal remoteness in the past or future. The results are particularly illuminating when compared to existing studies of European languages since this represents the first study of child acquisition of morphemes marking temporal remoteness. S uncovers a number of patterns that pose a challenge to previous assumptions about universal tendencies in child language acquisition. All of these, however, find explanation in light of the system of time reference characteristic of adult Inuktitut. For example, because Inuktitut encodes a basic future/nonfuture distinction rather than the more familiar past/nonpast dichotomy characteristic of European languages, the Inuit children surveyed naturally developed future markers before past markers. They also used overt past tense markers with atelic verbs first rather than with telic verbs. These findings contrast with studies based on the acquisition of European languages, where past tense marking with telic verbs is primary, and future markers appear later than markers of past tense. S’s results clearly testify to the importance of examining as broad a typological range of languages as possible before drawing conclusions about universal tendencies in child language acquisition.

The book ends with suggestions for future research, including the need to measure passive knowledge of time reference mechanisms in young Inuit children, as well as to examine acquisition in older children acquiring Inuktitut as a native language. Finally, one can only hope this study will stimulate investigations into how children acquire other complex morphologies.