Time in Child Inuktitut

This book presents a study of the development of time reference in
young children acquiring Inuktitut as a first language. The first such
study of an Eskimo-Aleut language, its account of children's
development of time reference in a system that is fundamentally
different from those found in languages previously studied makes a
unique contribution to the literature on the acquisition of tense and
aspect. Drawing on longitudinal spontaneous speech data from eight
Inuit children between 2 and 3-and-a-half years old, this study
analyzes the temporal structures, their meanings and context of use in
children's communicative interactions with siblings, peers and
caretakers during the early stages of language development. The
comprehensive study of previously unexplored temporal phenomena and its
unprecedented findings makes this book an important resource for
researchers, teachers and students of child language development,
especially the development of time reference. In addition, the
documentation of the Inuktitut temporal system, especially as used in
conversational speech, will be of interest to researchers of time
reference.