Today was yesterday tomorrow. The perception of time and the acquisition of language

Abstract

Temporal expressions present many problems regarding their conceptualization. Temporal deixis grammaticalises the relationship between the time of the situation described and the time of the deictic context, and its acquisition is essential in order to achieve a good command of the language. From a descriptive, linguistic and pragmatic perspective, and adopting a mixed methodology that integrates both qualitative and quantitative methods, the present paper provides a comprehensive study of the time markers that children use in the early years of their lives. More specifically, verbal forms (morphemes of time), subordinators, temporal adverbs and lexical expressions have been examined. Data for the present paper have been drawn from the Koiné corpus of child language, a corpus created at the University of Santiago de Compostela, and coordinated by Milagros Fernández Pérez. In particular, the interventions of two informants have been selected for analysis (1 boy and 1 girl between 2 and 4 years). The objectives pursued reflect the need to characterize expressions and temporal markers in child language. The results reveal the distinction and characterization of different acquisition stages in which we can observe how children use linguistic resources to acquire temporal discursive coordinates.