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Time Reference and Aspect Production in Russian 3-to-5-year-old Children

Student: Salamatina Aleksandra

Supervisor: Anastasiya Lopukhina

Faculty: Faculty of Humanities

Educational Programme: Fundamental and Computational Linguistics (Bachelor)

Final Grade: 8

Year of Graduation: 2020

The term verb aspect is very broadly applicable. It can refer to lexical aspect or to morphological aspect markers, such as inflectional or derivational morphemes. In Russian linguistics a lot of attention has been drawn to the problems of Russian aspect. Yet, a lot of unresolved issues remain in the field of aspect mastering by children at early stages of Russian language acquisition. For example, there has been a lot of controversy as to what children acquire first: Aspect or Tense. Some researchers state that verb forms in the past and present tenses occur simultaneously in children’s language. These first forms of verbs represent “here and now” situations: verbs in the past tense form represent “resultative” events that children perceive as occurring during speech or directly in front of it, while verbs in the present tense form usually denote current events. Thus, with early temporary oppositions or temporary morphology, children describe specific contrasts at the time of speech. This advocates for the “Aspect First” hypothesis. Conversely, other researchers e.g. Weist et al. (1984) argued against an early semantic-based analysis of tense and the “Aspect First” hypothesis, by showing that young children use verbs of state in the past tense. This research will try to resolve this controversy and outline the chronology of acquisition of aspect and tense in the language of 3-5 year-old children. Key words: Acquisition of aspect; Development of aspectual semantics; Russian aspect, acquisition of tense, child language morphology; production.

Full text (added May 30, 2020)

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