Children’s use of tenses beyond time

Abstract Children experience language (Ochs 2012) as they are involved in their everyday life, but language can also create worlds of its own. Children progressively use language about objects and events that they are not experiencing in the here and now. The current study asks whether some situations, constructed through language—called ‘langspace’—provide the affordances for children to learn the use of specific verb forms to mark disconnection—and going beyond the present time, the present space, the present reality. This study is based on the analyses of a longitudinal dataset of seven French-speaking children in interaction with their family at home. The analyses demonstrate that parents use specific verb forms to mark disconnections in their interactions with their children, and that as of age 2, children start producing these forms in similar langspace situations, especially when they express memories. They use those verb forms more and more productively and creatively to express a variety of disconnections as they get older.