Temporal deixis in early child Romanian

This paper investigates the contrastive use of tense-aspect inflections in early child Romanian. It focuses on the use of the prezent, perfect compus and the periphrastic future morphologies. It finds evidence of the ability to inflect a significant number of the verbs in all the tenses mentioned below the age of 3;0. Additionally, by analysing the context of occurrence of these child predicates, it shows that a basic system of temporal deixis becomes operative before the above-mentioned age. Consequently, the evidence presented by the paper runs against the claims of the Aspect First Hypothesis.