This paper presents and analyzes the encoding of aspect in Heritage Russian (HR), an incompletely acquired language spoken by those for whom another language became dominant at an early age. The HR aspectual system is distinct from the baseline. Aspectual distinctions are lost due to the leveling or loss of morphological marking. As a result, heritage speakers often maintain only one member of a former aspectual pair. Such HR verb forms are underspecified for aspect. To compensate for that, heritage speakers regularly express aspect through the use of analytical forms with the light verbs ‘be’, ‘become’, ‘do’. The frequent occurrence of these forms supports the notion that aspectual distinctions are universal, belonging with the conceptual representation of events. What varies is the actual linguistic encoding of these distinctions, but not the underlying distinctions themselves.
2022. Finiteness marking in Russian-speaking children with Specific Language Impairment. First Language 42:1 ► pp. 124 ff.
Listanti, Andrea & Jacopo Torregrossa
2023. The production of preverbal and postverbal subjects by Italian heritage children: Timing of acquisition matters. First Language 43:4 ► pp. 431 ff.
Moro, Francesca R
2017. Aspectual distinctions in Dutch-Ambon Malay bilingual heritage speakers. International Journal of Bilingualism 21:2 ► pp. 178 ff.
2023. Syntactic features of Russian speech of two generations of bilinguals and monolinguals: a complex sentence. Russian Language Studies 21:3 ► pp. 293 ff.
Whitehead Martelle, Wendy & Yasuhiro Shirai
2023. The Aspect Hypothesis and L2 Russian. Frontiers in Language Sciences 2
Zuban, Yulia, Maria Martynova, Sabine Zerbian, Luka Szucsich & Natalia Gagarina
2021. Word order in heritage Russian: clause type and majority language matter. Russian Linguistics 45:3 ► pp. 253 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Heritage Languages around the World. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 11 ff.
[no author supplied]
2021. Grammatical Aspects of Heritage Languages. In The Cambridge Handbook of Heritage Languages and Linguistics, ► pp. 579 ff.
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