Aspectual classes in adult and child Romanian

This paper classifies the predicates produced by young Romanian-speaking children function of lexical aspect, using the classical 4-partite Vendlerian classification of verb phrases into activities, accomplishments, achievements and states. Firstly, it discusses the tests proposed for English by Dowty (1979) in terms of their relevance for Romanian, and summarizes the useful criteria. Secondly, it provides examples of the four aspectual classes in child Romanian and investigates whether there are observable regularities in the distribution of tense morphology.