The acquisition of the future tense

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Pedagogy, Literature Studies, grade: 2,0, http://www.uni-jena.de/ (Institut für Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Syntactic Development, language: English, abstract: It is the goal of this paper to examine the acquisition of the future tense in

children"s speech. After a two word utterance stage they develop more and

more their speaking skills and start to talk about events and activities in the

future, apart from saying things about the present. To give a detailed account

of the acquisition of the future, this study includes several steps of

examination. It will not only try to answer to the questions, when children first

use future expressions and how their use develops in time. But it also includes

an analysis of the occurrence of future tense in specific constructions, such as

simple sentences, questions etc. It is also necessary to look at verbs as well as

subjects which occur with expressions of future tense. A last part of the study

is concerned with common errors children produce when speaking about the

future.

There exist several ways to express the future in adult grammar. The most

common forms, which are also the focus of this analysis, are the simple future

expressed by will and the going to-future. Other possibilities of expressing the

future, e.g. using simple present tense or a present progressive form of the

verb, will be neglected in this paper, as they are too complex in their concepts

for children. They mainly depend on adverbials of time to denote the future

and therefore would require a different focus of analysis.

The simple future is formed with the modal auxiliary will, followed by the

infinitive of a verb (e.g. Greenbaum 1991: 54), as in

(a) I will write the exam.

The will-future is used to convey two different concepts: first, it is used for

expressing general predictions and assumptions of what is going to happen in

the future and second, it marks spontaneous decisions, offers and promises.

(cf. Fleischhack 2001: 70).

The second form of expressing future tense is the combination of the

infinitive of a verb with a form of be going to, such as in

(b) I am going to work in the garden.