engleski

Production and comprehension of aspectual distinctions in Slavic languages and Greek

The present experimental study compares how typically developing monolingual children at age 5 comprehend and product perfective and imperfective verbs in several Slavic languages – Russian, Polish, Croatian, Serbian – and Modern Greek (s. Dressler et al. 2009 for the typological peculiarities of these languages). Most verbs in Slavic languages belong to either imperfective or perfective aspect with a complex system of contextually dependent aspectual meanings. Aspect form an opposition in which its perfective member is marked for the expression of resultativity/completion, while imperfective aspect is unmarked for this feature (Jakobson, 1957/1971). Thus, the imperfective aspect may denote both the ongoing and completed events. Method: Taking into consideration the above mentioned peculiarity of the aspectual systems we investigated five sets of the experimental data collected within the same design. These data were collected from around twenty 5 year old children from the middle-class families and a control group of adults for each language. The experiments were designed within the COST project and elaborated by van Hout (Van Hout et al. xxx) and included mini- video films with the main protagonists performing various ongoing vs. interrupted actions. Material: Stimuli were chosen according to the principle of the semantic and pragmatic constraints of the mini-video films situations. Three prefixed aspectual pairs and three pairs with suffixation and stem alternation were taken in the respective Slavic languages. In Greek, all aspectual pairs show the same type of stem alternation, namely, the perfective aspect is formed from the plain verbal root, i.e. imperfective, by a phonological change of its last phoneme. Results: Comprehension: It has been found that the children perform better in the completed in comparison with the uncompleted situations. In the comprehension of the uncompleted (interrupted) situations the children do not accept the imperfective verbs and estimate the pattern “uncompleted situation- imperfective verb” as incorrect. Not only do children reject the imperfective verbs regularly, they insist on these answers and give such explanations as “because the protagonists didn’t have time to finish”, “because he was late”, “because he didn’t manage”. Production: the children use predominantly perfectives for the complete situations. For the uncompleted situations they produce imperfective verbs and a high number of other answers that are acceptable in the given situations. These other answers consist of a high number of negated perfective verbs. The use of the imperfective with the completed situations is accounted for by the above discussed peculiarity of the aspectual meanings in Slavic languages and Greek, namely the so-called ‘imperfective’ paradox. The high number of other answers in the uncompleted situations is due to the pragmatics referring to the interrupted situations the children perceived.

child language; Slavic languages; aquisition of aspect

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