Temporal deixis in early child Romanian

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