accounts for the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in child L2 English. The main question addressed is whether early uses of tense-aspect in¯ections can be analyzed as a spell-out of semantic/aspectual features of verbs (such as punctuality, telicity, durativity, etc.). The data are drawn from a detailed longitudinal study of an eight-year-old Russian-speaking child who was acquiring English as L2 in the USA. It is ®rst shown that the emergence of tense-aspect morphology patterns by aspectual verb class. However, contrary to the Aspect-before-Tense Hypothesis, it is argued that the acquisition patterns cannot be attributed to``defective'' tense, nor do they re¯ect the spell-out of aspectual features. A new approach to the data is developed that proposes underspeci®cation of the syntactic aspectual head in early L2 child grammar. Relevance of child L2 data for the study of tenseaspectMuch recent research has explored ®niteness in early child L2 by focusing on the acquisition of tense and agreement morphology (

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