The Interaction of Viewpoint Aspect-Situation Types and the Organization of Fore-Background Plan in the Primary School Third Grade Turkish Coursebook’s Texts

The aim of this study is to analyze the discourse functions of viewpoint aspect morphemes in the Turkish course book narrative texts regarded as one of the most important written linguistic input for child in the process of mother tongue education. In line with this aim, we classify the viewpoint aspect morphemes according to the situation type verbs in the texts based on Smith (1991)’s two component theory of aspect, thereby we try to define these morphemes’ role in the organization of the narrative texts’ foreground and background plan. The quantitative and qualitative results obtained in the study show that the perfective aspect morphemes go with accomplishment and achievement verbs in the data so they code the foreground information. On the other hand when they go with stative and activity verbs, they code the background information. As for the imperfective aspect morphemes, they always code the background information with all the situation types. The distribution of grammatical aspect according to lexical aspect seen in this study is in accordance with the conventions of narrative genre.