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Beginning and end in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 December 2005

SABINE STOLL
SABINE STOLL
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig
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Abstract

The goal of this research is to determine the relevant factors that aid in the acquisition of the perfective aspect in Russian. Results confirm the findings of previous research, which say that aspect is not learned as a uniform category, but rather interrelates with the acquisition of Aktionsarten. This study focuses on the factors responsible for the difference in the rate of the acquisition of two complementary Aktionsarten in the perfective aspect: telic verbs (verbs including a result/goal of the denoted event) and ingressive verbs (verbs including the beginning of the event).

Since the usage of Aktionsarten strongly depends on the surrounding discourse, two experiments that varied in their discourse complexity were conducted. One study looked at the production of isolated utterances (thirty-nine children aged 3;0 to 6;11) and the other study focused on complex texts (fifty-two children aged 3;0 to 6;11). It was found that while telics are used independently of discourse context, ingressives depend strongly on contextual information.

These results suggest that discourse complexity and narrative competence define the acquisitional process for ingressives, yet are irrelevant in the acquisition of telics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , November 2005 , pp. 805 - 825
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

This research was supported by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. I warmly thank the children and the kindergartens of St. Petersburg that participated in the study. I am further indebted to Natalja Guseva for help in administrating the experiments, Tatjana Krugljakova for transcribing the data, and Galina Dobrova for logistic help. Special thanks go to Balthasar Bickel, Johanna Nichols, Dan Slobin and Alan Timberlake for continuous support, many inspiring discussions, and very helpful comments at all stages of this research. Further, I would like to thank Elena Lieven and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments. Great thanks also go to Daniel Stahl for help with the statistics.