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This paper describes the experience of using the Norwegian and Russian versions of LITMUS-MAIN to elicit narrative data from bilingual Norwegian-Russian children as well as from Norwegian- and Russian-speaking monolinguals (Rodina 2017, 2018). The paper reports on the slight adaptations to the standardized design, procedure and analysis that were done to make the tasks more suitable for this specific population. It highlights the advantages, challenges, and potential associated with the task against a backdrop of the research conducted with Norwegian-Russian bilinguals in Norway.
The 'Russian language proficiency test for multilingual children' is a linguistically and psycholinguistically-grounded test for L1-Russian bilingual children of pre-school and elementary school age. It allows the evaluation of language proficiency in Russian for scientific, therapeutic, and pedagogical purposes. The test is based on preliminary norms: data of 167 German-Russian bilingual children between the ages of 3 years and 6 years 11 months were evaluated.
Bilingual children's proficiency is examined in the following language domains:
- productive and receptive lexicon for verbs and nouns
- production of morphological marking on verbs (first and second-person singular present verbal inflection) and nouns (accusative and dative case singular)
- comprehension of grammatical constructions on the sentence level
The test should be administered by a competent – ideally native – speaker of Russian, and takes approximately 60 minutes to administer.
In addition to the test itself, the 'Russian language proficiency test for multilingual children' contains a questionnaire for gathering detailed information on the input situation as well as the child's previous linguistic and extra-linguistic development. The questionnaire is written in English and Russian and is intended to be filled out by the parents.
'Sprachstandstest Russisch für mehrsprachige Kinder' ist ein linguistisch und psycholinguistisch fundiertes Sprachstandsscreening für bilingual russisch-deutsche Kinder im Vorschul- und Frühschulalter. Es ermöglicht die Einschätzung des Sprachstands im Russischen, auf der Basis vorläufiger Normen, zu wissenschaftlichen, therapeutischen und pädagogischen Zwecken.
Der Test sollte von kompetenten, im Idealfall muttersprachlichen Sprechern des Russischen durchgeführt werden. Die Durchführungsdauer beträgt ca. 60 Minuten.
'Sprachstandstest Russisch' überprüft die Fähigkeiten bilingualer Kinder im Russischen in folgenden Bereichen:
- produktives und rezeptives Lexikon für Verben und Nomen
- Produktion morphologischer Markierungen an Verben (Verbflexion 1. und 2. Person Singular Präsens) und Nomen (Kasus Akkusativ und Dativ Singular)
- Verständnis grammatischer Strukturen auf Satzebene
Zur Interpretation der Testergebnisse werden vorläufige bilinguale Normdaten zur Verfügung gestellt. Sie basieren auf einer Stichprobe von insgesamt 167 deutsch-russisch aufwachsenden Kindern von drei bis sechs Jahren.
Zusätzlich zum Test zur Feststellung der sprachlichen Kompetenzen enthält 'Sprachstandstest Russisch' einen Fragebogen, der die detaillierte Inputsituation sowie die bisherige sprachliche und nichtsprachliche Entwicklung des Kindes erfasst. Der Fragebogen ist russisch-deutsch verfasst und wird von den Eltern durch Ankreuzen ausgefüllt.
The purpose of this research was to trace the developmental steps in the acquisition of aspectual oppositions in Russian and to examine the validity of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis for L1-speaking children. Imperfective/perfective verbs and their inflections, as well as aspectual pairs, were analysed in the first five months of verb production (and the respective months in the input) in three children. Additionally, the first four months of verb production were investigated in one boy with less data. Verb forms marked for the past and for the present occur simultaneously in all children. These early forms relate to 'here and now' situations: verbs marked for the past denote 'resultative' events that are perceived by the children as occurring during the speech time or immediately before it, while verbs marked for the present typically denote on-going events. Thus, with early tense oppositions (or tense morphology) children mark aspectual contrasts in the moment of speech: evidence in favour of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis.
A strong preference in using the perfective aspect for the past and the imperfective aspect for the present events has been found in both adults and children. Further, only very few aspectual pairs were documented within the analysed period (from the onset of verb production to the period when children produce rule-driven inflectional forms). The productive use of the finite forms of perfective and imperfective verbs doesn't concord with the ability of the productive use of the contrastive forms of one lemma. Data suggest that children (start to) learn aspectual forms in an item-based manner. The acquisition of aspectual oppositions (aspectual pairs) is lexically dependent and is guided by the contextual 'thesaurus'. Aspectual pairs are learned in a peace-meal way during much longer, than observed for this article, period of time. Generally, aspect is not learned as a rule, also because there are no (uniform) rules of forming of aspectual pairs, but as the 'satellite' of the inherent lexical meaning of verbs of diverse Aktionsarten.
The issues addressed here are relevant for other Slavic languages, exhibiting the morphological category of aspect.
On the early development of aspect in greek and russian child language, a comparative analysis
(2003)
The category of aspect is grammaticized in both Greek and Russian opposing perfective and imperfective verb forms in all inflectional categories except the nonpast (‘present’). Despite these similarities there are important differences in the way the aspectual systems function in the two languages. While in Greek nearly all verbs oppose a perfective to a given imperfective grammatical form, Russian aspect is more strongly lexicalized with pairs of imperfective and perfective lexemes not only differing aspectually, but also as far as their lexical meanings are concerned. This is especially true of perfective verbs formed by prefixes as compared to their imperfective bases. Thus, in pairs of prefixed and unprefixed dynamic verbs, the derived prefixed (perfective) member has a telic meaning while its unprefixed (imperfective) counterpart is atelic (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. jest’ (IPF) ‘to eat’). Such derived perfective verbs may in turn be “secondarily” imperfectivized by suffixation furnishing the only “true” perfective/imperfective pairs of verbs (e.g. sjest’ (PFV) ‘to eat up’ vs. sjedat’ (IPF) ‘to eat up’ (iterative)). “Secondary” imperfectives do not occur in our child data.
In this pilot study, we will analyze the tense-aspect-mood forms of the 20 most frequent verbs with equivalent meanings occurring in the longitudinal audiotaped data of a Greek and a Russian boy between 2;1 and 2;3 (their entire lexical inventories comprise approx. 100 verbs each).
We adopt a constructivist perspective on the development of aspect in Greek and Russian child language and will show that in spite of a broad inventory of imperfective and perfective verb forms to be found in the speech of both children aspect has not yet developed into a generalized grammatical category, but is strongly dependent on aktionsart (stative/dynamic, telic/atelic) in both languages. While this results in a strong preference for perfective verb forms of telic verbs and of imperfective forms of atelic ones in the speech of the Greek boy, the Russian child tends to use the unmarked members.
It has been previously reported that in languages demonstrating the Root Infinitive (RI) Stage the use of RIs is characterized by two properties: these forms are overwhelmingly eventive and have, in the majority of instances, a modal interpretation. Hoekstra and Hyams (1998, 1999) have proposed a theory stating that these two properties of RIs are co-dependent in that the application of the modal reference restriction limits the use of the aspectual verbal classes to eventive predicates. Furthermore, this theory assumed that the described mutual dependency of these constraints was valid cross-linguistically.
In this paper, we investigate the application of this theory to the case of RIs in Russian, one of the languages exhibiting the RI Stage. Using new longitudinal data from two monolingual Russian-speaking children, we demonstrate that the predictions of Hoekstra and Hyams’ approach are not realized for Russian child speech. While the constraint requiring that Ris have a modal reference does not seem to apply in Russian since the infinitival forms do receive past and present tense interpretation, these predicates are still overwhelmingly eventive and stative predicates appear mostly as finite verbs. Having shown that a theory connecting the application of the two restrictions on RIs does not account for the Russian data, we examine several alternative analyses of Russian RIs. We arrive at a conclusion that an explanation based on the lack of the event variable in stative predicates (Kratzer 1989) necessary for the interpretation of RIs in discourse (Avrutin 1997) succeeds in handling the Russian data presented in this article.
The papers of this 33th volume of the ZAS Papers in Linguistics present intermediate results of the ZAS-project on language acquisition. Currently we deal with the question of which functions children assign to the first grammatical forms they use productively. The goal is to identify grammatical features comprising the child's early grammar. This issue is investigated within the analyses of longitudinal data (cf. the papers of Gagarina/Bittner, Gagarina, Kühnast/Popova/Popov, Bewer) as well as within experimental research (see the papers of Bittner, Kühnast/Popova/Popov). The main topic of this volume is the acquisition of definite articles and verbal aspect.
Bewer – who has worked as a student assistant in the project for a long time and wrote her MA-thesis on the topic of the project – investigates children's acquisition of gender features in German. Kühnast/Popova/Popov discuss the correlations between the acquisition of definite articles and verbal aspect in Bulgarian. Bittner presents results of an experimental study on definite article perception in adult German. Gagarina traces the emergence of aspectual oppositions in Russian and examines the validity of the 'aspect before tense' hypothesis for L1-speaking children. Additionally, the paper of Gagarina/Bittner deals with the interrelation between the acquisition of finiteness and verb arguments in Russian and German.
The study examines the hypotheses that the acquisition of the finite verb is an indispensable and linking constituent of the development of SVO utterances. Four apparently separate or at least separable processes are analysed over 6 months in one Russian and one German child: a) the emergence of verbs in the child’s utterances, b) the occurrence of correctly inflected (finite) verb forms, c) the development of multi-component utterances containing a verb, and c) the emergence of (potential) subjects and objects. Russian and German exhibit rich verb morphology, and in both languages finiteness is strongly correlated with inflectional categories like person, number and tense. With both children we find a correlation in the temporal order of these four processes and – what is more relevant for our study – a dependency of a certain development on the utterance level on the emergence of finite verbs. Further, our investigation shows that language-specific development comes in to play already when children start to acquire verb inflection and becomes more contrastive when we observe the onset of the production of the SVO utterances.
This paper deals with the development of discourse competence in German-, Russian- and Bulgarian-speaking children. In particular, it examines the use of anaphoric pronominal reference in elicited narrations of children between the ages of 2;6 and 6;0. As the pronominal (and nominal) systems of target German, Russian and Bulgarian differ in the repertoire and functions of anaphoric elements we will examine which kind of noun phrases children use to make reference to story participants. In a second step of the analysis, we will investigate how pronominal expressions relate to antecedents. In this respect the pronominal form of the anaphor, the syntactic function of the antecedent and the distance between antecedent and anaphor will be analyzed. The findings will be discussed with regard to predictions made by proposals such as the Complementary Hypothesis (Bosch, Rozario, and Zhao 2003) which assumes an asymmetry between the use of personal pro-nouns and demonstrative pronouns when referring back to subject or object antecedents.