Abstract
We study factors influencing aspectual errors in written texts of advanced learners of Russian with dominant English. Our study is based on the data from the Russian Learner Corpus, as well as a mini-corpus collected from a group of advanced Russian learners who are native speakers of English. Our findings suggest that the incidence, direction, and type of aspectual errors depend on the level of language mastery. On lower levels, there are more perfective-to-imperfective substitutions (*Я наконец делала уроки ‘I finally did.IPF my homework’ instead of Я наконец сделала уроки ‘I finally did.PF my homework’), possibly due to greater morphological simplicity of erroneous imperfective forms, as well as their earlier instruction and acquisition. However, on higher levels of language mastery, the number of imperfective-to-perfective substitutions increases (*Я не хочу купить ему подарок ‘I don’t want to buy.PF him a present’ instead of Я не хочу покупать ему подарок ‘I don’t want to buy.IPF him a present’). Perfective tends to replace imperfective, irrespectively of the morphological complexity, in cases when the required use of imperfective is driven by grammatical rules rather than the semantics of the form, e.g. in iterative or negative constructions. Possibly, it happens because learners are guided by the aspectual semantics (lexical aspect) and disregard the grammatical rules when they contradict it (morphological aspect). Additionally, it appears that both perfective-to-imperfective and imperfective-to-perfective substitutions are context-dependent. Both tend to happen less frequently in finite, factual past contexts, and more frequently in non-finite, non-factual contexts where aspectual oppositions are mitigated.
Аннотация
Мы изучаем факторы, влияющие на аспектуальные ошибки в письменных текстах студентов-носителей английского языка, изучающих русский язык на продвинутом уровне. Наше исследование основано на данных Учебного Корпуса русского языка, а также мини-корпуса, собранного в группе продвинутых студентов, изучающих русский язык, с родным английским. Наши результаты показывают, что частота, направление и тип видовых ошибок зависят от уровня владения языком. На более низких уровнях более частотны замены совершенного вида несовершенным (*Я наконец делала уроки вместо Я наконец сделала уроки), возможно, из-за большей морфологической простоты используемых форм несовершенного вида, а также их более раннего изучения и освоения. Однако на более высоких уровнях владения языком количество замен несовершенного вида на совершенный увеличивается (*Я не хочу купить ему подарок вместо Я не хочу покупать ему подарок). Совершенный вид имеет тенденцию заменять несовершенный, независимо от морфологической сложности, в случаях, когда требуемое использование несовершенного вида обусловлено грамматическими правилами (морфологический вид), а не семантикой формы (лексический вид), например, в узуальных или отрицательных конструкциях. Возможно, это происходит потому, что учащиеся руководствуются семантикой совершенного вида и игнорируют противоречащие ей грамматические правила. Кроме того, представляется, что все виды видовых ошибок зависят от контекста. Оба типа замен реже происходят в финитных фактивных контекстах прошедшего времени и чаще в нефинитных нефактивных контекстах, где аспектуальные оппозиции выражены менее четко или же снимаются.
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Russian Learner Corpus (Русский учебный корпус). URL: http://webcorpora.net/RLC/
Notes
Following Janda and Lyashevskaya’s (2011) corpus study of verbal grammatical profiles, we consider these two types of aspectual pairs as equally legitimate. We do not delve into certain debatable and complex aspectological issues, such as what constitutes an aspectual pair (Maslov, 1948; Glovinskaja, 1982; Zaliznjak et al., 2015), since all pairs in our sample satisfy the traditional Maslovian criteria.
Giannakidou (2013, p. 19) defines non-veridical contexts as “contexts where the truth of a proposition p is open […]: questions, modal verbs and adverbs, imperatives, conditionals, the future, disjunctions, before clauses, and subjunctive selecting propositional attitudes such as want, hope, suggest are all nonveridical. Negative contexts are a subcase of the nonveridical”.
As demonstrated in Gusev (2021), the actual rules are subtler than simple imperfectivization in all negated modal contexts. Not all negated modal contexts require replacing perfective with the imperfective, but as a general rule, it happens, and in all examples in our sample, the use of perfective in negated modal contexts was erroneous.
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Apresjan, V. Errors in foreign language acquisition as a multifaceted phenomenon: the case of Russian aspect. Russ Linguist 48, 3 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-023-09287-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11185-023-09287-8