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Acquisition Of Tense In Xhosa: The Long And The Short Of It, Sandile Gxilishe, Jill De Villiers, Peter A. De Villiers

Philosophy: Faculty Publications

The purpose of the present paper it so determine when Xhosa-speaking children master the morphology of tense. Specifically, we ask when Xhosa-speaking children learn the conditions on the two forms of the Present and Recent Past tenses, namely the long and the short forms. Despite the fact that there are complex grammatical conditions on which form is appropriate in a sentence, the paper will demonstrate that young children can attend to these grammatical conditions.