Acquisizione dell’aspetto nelle lingue slave e romanze [Усвоениe вида в славянских и романских языках]

Abstract

The paper presents existing research on aspect acquisition in Romance and Slavic languages learned as L1 and L2. It includes also works concerning ‘incomplete acquisition’ of American Russian. All learners exhibit a striking regularity when acquiring aspect in both groups of languages: they first learn perfective aspect with past tense telic verbs and only later on do they extend it to atelic verbs, whereas the imperfective is used in the initial stage with atelic verbs and then with telic ones. Such studies demonstrate that both the lexical classes distinction and the separation between lexical and grammatical aspect are cognitively motivated.