Semantic and Morphological Reflexes of Functional Categories

Aspect has widely been identified as an area presenting the most significant challenge to second language learners of Russian. The following citation from the pedagogical literature illustrates the common perception: “For speakers of English and other language learners who are only familiar with other, structurally similar Western European languages, the Russian verbal system is a tangled web of unseen connections and morphological pitfalls. While the number of tenses is limited to present and past with a compound, non-inflected future and the only mood, per se, is the indicative, the complexities of the aspectual system offset any perception of simplicity.” (Altman, 1992: 52). In this article, I argue that “the tangled web” mentioned above combines two different learning tasks that are worth teasing apart: acquiring that a prefixed verb denotes a telic event, and learning all individual prefixes that are selected by a specific verb. The first type of knowledge involves acquisition of the semantic reflex of a functional category, while the second task essentially involves a mapping problem: lexical learning of different morphemes instantiating the functional category. In acquiring Russian, English native speakers have to switch to another value of the telicity marking parameter (Smith 1991/1997, Slabakova, 1997, 2000, 2001). My experimental results indicate that advanced and intermediate Russian L2 learners have successfully acquired the grammatical mechanism of marking telicity, while still having considerable difficulty with learning the lexical items signaling telicity. I suggest that mapping problem difficulties may persist in interlanguage development long after the actual acquisition of a functional category has been completed. This interpretation naturally invites the question of what constitutes evidence for successful acquisition of a functional category. Let us consider the three types of knowledge to be acquired. These are: 1) morphological reflexes: target-like usage of inflectional and/or derivational morphology (if any); 2) syntactic reflexes: knowledge of feature strength, which would result in movement prior to or after spell-out, case-marking, etc.; and 3) semantic reflexes: knowledge of the semantic properties of the functional category, or what meanings are computed when the particular functional category is checked. Both researchers who claim that full acquisition of L2 functional categories is feasible (e.g., Epstein, Flynn, & Martohardjono, 1996; Flynn, 1996; Haznedar & Schwartz, 1997; Lardiere, 1998a, 1998b; Prévost & White, 1999, 2000; Schwartz & Sprouse, 1996; among others) and those who consider access to functional categories to be severely restricted (Hawkins & Chan, 1997; Meisel, 1997; Smith & Tsimpli, 1995; Tsimpli & Roussou, 1991) have investigated the syntactic reflexes of functional morphology in interlanguage production. For example, Lardiere (2000) studied the linguistic production of a Chinese learner of English whose L2 morphological form diverges considerably from that of the target language input. In order to assess whether the learner had a TP in