UCL Working Papers in Linguistics 13 (2001)
Aspects of
aspect: Acquiring grammatical aspect in Modern Greek: The interaction of aspect
with aspectual adverbials in children’s grammars
GEORGIA PANITSA
This paper gives a detailed presentation of a study that was
conducted at a nursery school in Greece,
with Greek subjects aged 1,9,19 to 4,3,15. Our elicited imitation task focused
on the acquisition of verbal aspect by Greek children, with particular
reference to their comprehension of the semantics of perfective vs imperfective viewpoint aspect and to their ability to
successfully combine aspectual adverbials with verbs set for the perfective or
imperfective aspectual value. Thus, the role of adverbial expressions in the
determination of aspect in MG as well as the children's awareness and mastery
of the system is examined. In respect of the positioning of aspectual
adverbials in children’s grammars, we found that upon reproduction
children had a strong preference to place them in a position immediately
following the verb irrespective
of their position in the input. These findings were interpreted syntactically
(following Cinque 1999) both in comparison with the
adult grammar and also in terms of the acquisition of the semantics of aspect
and of aspectual adverbials.
[PDF file]