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Article published In:
Register Studies
Vol. 5:1 (2023) ► pp.82–110

The use of periphrasis for the expression of aspect by Greek heritage speakers

A case study of register variation narrowing

ORCID logo | Leibniz-Centre General Linguistics (ZAS) | Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
ORCID logo | Humboldt Universität zu Berlin
In this paper, we examine the narrowing of register variation in the domain of verbal aspect in the production of aspect by two different age groups of Greek heritage speakers (HSs), adolescents and adults, which we compared to their monolingual peers. We first identify a previously undocumented case of register variation for the expression of perfective aspect in Greek. Both HSs and monolingual speakers have at their disposal synthetic and analytic forms, the latter built on the basis of light verbs, to express grammatical aspect, and specifically perfective aspect. While monolinguals make use of this alternation to signal register variation, with periphrastic constructions used in informal settings and in the oral mode, HSs behave differently. Both adolescent and adult HSs generalize periphrastic constructions across formal and informal communicative situations, thus showing a case of register variation narrowing. The fact that periphrastic constructions are associated with perfective aspect is due to aspect levelling: HSs overgeneralize the use of the perfective aspect.
Keywords: register variation, periphrastic constructions, light verbs, perfectivity, aspectual morphology, Greek
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Background
    • 2.1The Greek verbal system: Aspect, prefixes, and light verbs
    • 2.2[+Learned] features in the Greek lexicon
    • 2.3Register and register variation (in Greek)
  • 3.Research questions and predictions
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Participants
    • 4.2The task
  • 5.Results
  • 6.Discussion
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 20 December 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.20022.ale
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