Nungon near future tense in child and child-directed Nungon speech : a case study

One of the milestones of child linguistic and cognitive development is the ability to articulate hypothetical situations and events: either those set in a general non-past time, or those which could have occurred in the past, but did not (on hypothetical situations, see Kuczaj and Daly 1979 and Kuczaj 1981; on counterfactuals, see Harris et al. 1996). But the timing of production may relate in intricate ways to both cognition and language-particular grammatical features, such as the characteristics of verb forms used in describing hypothetical situations (Gathercole 2006).