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How learnable is Russian aspect?
We present two studies of corpus data that can model the learnability of Russian
aspect for L1 and L2 learners. In Russian, all verbs are either perfective or
imperfective, and the use and meaning of aspect is a topic of long-standing
debate (cf. Janda 2004 and Janda et al. 2013). It is unclear how children acquire
this grammatical distinction in L1 (Stoll 2001), and it is clear that L2 learners
struggle with this grammatical distinction (Martelle 2011).
A challenge for L1 learners is that while Russian employs abundant
morphological markers for aspect, this marking is not regular enough to reliably
identify verbs as perfective or imperfective. Simplex verbs are usually
imperfective (like pisat’ ‘write’), but can be perfective (like dat’ ‘give’). Prefixed
verbs that do not have a secondary suffix are usually perfective (like na-pisat’
‘write’), but can be imperfective (like pre-obladat’ ‘prevail’). Furthermore,
sometimes one and the same verb has both perfective and imperfective
interpretations, such as biaspectual verbs (like annulirovat’ ‘annul’) and some
prefixed motion verbs (like s-xodit’ which can be a perfective verb meaning ‘go
someplace and come back’ or an imperfective verb meaning ‘go down’).
We ask to what extent it is possible to sort Russian verbs according to their
aspect by relying only on the distribution of grammatical forms, using a method
we call “grammatical profiling” (cf. Janda & Lyashevskaya 2011). What we do is
to collect the grammatical profile (distribution of forms in past tense, present
tense, infinitive, imperative, etc.) for each verb in a corpus and then see how a
multiple correspondence analysis sorts out the verb for the mathematically
constructed factor (“Factor 1”) that accounts for the largest portion of the
variance in the data. We find that Factor 1, with some deviations, captures the
imperfective vs. perfective distinction. In other words, given only the
distributions of forms, when the statistical analysis sorts verbs into “+” vs. “-”
values of Factor 1, it turns out that this distributions largely corresponds to the
perfective vs. imperfective distinction. This suggests that it might be possible to
deduce the aspect of a verb from the statistical distribution of its forms, and
Goldberg (2006) has shown that learners are indeed sensitive to such
distributions.
For L2, we look at the distribution of contexts that are offered in textbooks to
guide students of Russian in choosing perfective vs. imperfective (Reynolds
2016: 100-104). We see that while these guidelines are quite reliable (95-98% of
such contexts indeed have the predicted aspect in a corpus), they are
unfortunately also rather rare (only 2-3% of verbs in a corpus occur in the
contexts specified by the textbooks), so they are not very useful for L2 learners.
The problem is that many verbs occur in contexts where either aspect can
appear and selection is based on speaker construal. We intend to compare the
performance of native speakers, machine learning, and L2 learners in predicting
the aspect of verbs in corpus examples.
References:
Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at Work: The Nature of Generalization in
Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Janda Laura A. 2004. A metaphor in search of a source domain: the categories of
Slavic aspect. Cognitive Linguistics 15:4, 471-527.
Janda, Laura A. and Olga Lyashevksaya. 2011. Grammatical profiles and the
interaction of the lexicon with aspect, tense and mood in Russian. Cognitive
Linguistics 22:4, 719-763.
Janda, Laura A., Anna Endresen, Julia Kuznetsova, Olga Lyashevskaya, Anastasia
Makarova, Tore Nesset, Svetlana Sokolova. 2013. Why Russian aspectual prefixes
aren’t empty: prefixes as verb classifiers. Bloomington, IN: Slavica Publishers.
Martelle, Wendy. 2011. Testing the Aspect Hypothesis in L2 Russian. Doctoral
Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.
Reynolds, Robert J. 2016. Russian natural language processing for computerassisted language learning. Doctoral Dissertation, UiT The Arctic University of
Norway.
Stoll, Sabine. 2001. The Acquisition of Russian Aspect. Doctoral Dissertation,
University of California, Berkeley.