ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at a transitional stage that many 2- and 3-year-old children go through in the acquisition of the morphosyntax of tense, in which they alternate between tensed and tenseless verb forms in finite clauses. It provides data from naturalistic child speech to illustrate the phenomenon. The chapter argues against analyzing tenseless forms as morphologically underspecified verbs that have the same syntax as tensed forms. It shows that morphosyntactic variability in children's realization of tense, agreement, and case is attributable to the development of an underspecified head Agreement constituent constituent. Evidence that children have acquired a morphologically projected tense system lies, for instance, in the fact that they produce overgeneralized past tense forms such as comed, goed, taked, and seed. The chapter aims to interrelate three types of morphosyntactic errors made by young children: errors of tense morphology, errors of agreement morphology, and errors of case morphology.
