The role of pragmatics in the development of Russian aspect

Abstract

We report three experiments on the development of Russian aspect in children from 3;0 to 6;5 (and some data on 14-year-olds) which show that Russian children have a good deal of knowledge of aspect, but that they often use imperfectives where adults use perfectives. Experiment I, a narrative task, and Experiment II, a comprehension task, show that children understand the syntactic and semantic aspects of perfectivity and imperfectivity. In an elicitation task (Experiment III), the children (to 6;5) over-use imperfectives to a great extent. We discuss a well-known phenomenon in Russian in which imperfectives are used although the action has been completed, and conclude that this usage depends on the speaker's treatment of the statement as old in formation. We suggest that children's over-use of the imperfective is due to their mistaken treatment of statements as old information, and relate this error to well-known developments in the use of determiners and in binding theory. The use of pronominal and null subjects in the narrative task supports our interpretation.