Restructuring of verbal aspect in Heritage Russian: Beyond lexicalization

The paper explores the interaction of the perfective-imperfective aspectual contrasts with the telic-atelic distinction in American Russian (AR), a reduced variety of Russian spoken in the US by bilingual immigrants who initially acquired Russian as an L1 but subsequently replaced it with English as their primary language. This work combines qualitative and quantitative methods in order to examine aspectual restructuring in spontaneous AR production data and to measure aspectual variation at the VP-level experimentally, focusing on the correlation between the occurrence of verbal aspectual morphology and the telicity of a VP. Experimental data are presented on the distribution of perfective and imperfective forms with predicates denoting activities and accomplishments, which are found to exhibit aspectual variation at the VP-level, suggesting that the interaction of (im)perfectivity and (a)telicity in AR extends beyond the level of verbal lexical aspect, or the inherent properties of verbal roots.