L2 acquisition of Russian aspect by L1 Turkish speakers

Abstract

This study examines the acquisition of functional morphology which overtly marks lexical aspect in Russian by adult second language (L2) learners of Turkish. Russian and Turkish are different in the ways they mark both grammatical and lexical aspects. In Russian, both grammatical and lexical (telic) aspects are marked by overt verbal morphology. In Turkish, however, while the grammatical aspect of verbs is marked by inflectional morphemes, which also express tense and/or mood (Kornfilt, 1997), lexical aspect (telicity) is marked by quantized nominal arguments combined with dynamic verbs. We tested 16 L1 Turkish/L2 Russian learners and 16 L1 Russian speakers on a Semantic Entailment (SE) task with telicity and boundedness semantic features and a Truth-Value Judgment (TVJ) task involving sentences with perfective and imperfective forms including quantity and non-quantity internal argument themes. The results of the SE task indicated that L2 Russian speakers were not as successful as L1 Russian speakers in choosing the most logical entailment to perfective sentences rather than imperceptive sentences. The differences between the two groups were statistically significant. The results of the TVJ task also indicated that L2 Russian speakers were less successful than L1 Russian speakers in matching perfective and imperfective sentences with correct pictures. These findings support the claim that adult L2 speakers have difficulty with the acquisition of functional morphology, in particular aspectual morphology and its telicity feature.