Verb Classes Acquisition in Russian by L2 Learners

In this paper we investigated the acquisition of verbal morphology by students learning Russian as a foreign language in terms of verb classes. We tested which classes' patterns would be default for students. We collected examples of errors in verb conjugation of different classes using the RLC (Russian Learner Corpus). The analysis of the results showed that -aj- class (chitat' — chitaju), is default only for students who have mastered Russian at the elementary level. Students who speak Russian at the Intermediate level and above tend to extend the pattern of -aj- class only to verbs with the infinitive in -avat'. At the same time, for verbs belonging to the -aj- and -ova- classes, students tend to apply the truncation pattern. Such results indicate that at the intermediate level of Russian language proficiency they consciously avoid the wide spread of the -aj- pattern, which leads to hypercorrection.