Though I have trouble grasping the aspectual nature of telicity in Russian VPs in light of the presence or absence of a perfective prefix versus an object’s quantization, this article seems to prove that L2 Russian learners quickly acquire the ability to interpret telicity but not due to grammatical mechanisms but rather through the acquisition of morphological, semantic and syntactic reflexes. These results indicate that speakers were able to acquire the functional category associated with telic marking at even beginning levels of proficiency. The perceived difficulty of learners understanding and using telic verbs lies rather in the learning “the lexical items signaling telicity†instead of the “grammatical mechanisms of telicity markingâ€.
Somehow, I am just not grasping telicity. I’ve read through the author’s description a few times and hunted around Wikipedia and the internet but it’s not sticking. Err, hopefully I’ll just wake up and understand it? That aside, I found it interesting that even low-intermediate level learners had a good grasp on the grammar aspect of telicity and it was implied that it was the lexical aspect that was difficult.
I had a difficulty on understanding the concept of telicity so that I have to make it clear. I am interested in Russian itself. It is because Russian is considered as a difficult language to learn for Japanese and same for English speakers.
From what I could gather, this paper tried to assess the difficult L1 English learners of Russian had difficulty acquiring the concept of telicity. The author comes to the conclusion that this difficulty is on the lexical level rather than the grammatical level. In English, telicity is expressed in the quantification of the object (one of the ex. in the study was “cake” vs “the cake” or “a piece of cake”). In Russian, however, telicity is expressed by adding 1 of 19 perfective prefixes to the verb. So even if the object is quantified in a sentence, that sentence can still be atelic, something English speakers must grapple with when learning Russian.
The author then goes on to discuss perfectivity in relation to telicity, which she says is a “far from straightforward” relationship with one another, since not all perfective prefixes necessarily denote telicity. This is something I think I’d like a little more clarification on though.
This paper is about the competence of Russian L2 speakers on interpreting verb telicity. Low-intermediate speakers displayed L1 transfer with speakers interpreting the verb as telic where there was counted or demonstrative noun. Higher-level speakers did not rely on the noun, but did not allow the same range of interpretations preferring the atelic interpretation when native speakers allowed the telic and atelic interpretations. However, the higher-level speakers had native-like competence with interpreting perfective and imperfective verbs. This study highlights the difference between competence and performance.
I also had a difficult time fully grasping telicity. However, I was very intrigued by the author’s results, which showed that learners across all levels were able to grasp the concept. In particular, I found it interesting that the advanced and high intermediate level learners of Russian had results on perfective sentences that were indistinguishable from those of Native Speakers.
Being not from linguistics background, I honestly had never heard of telicity until I read this article. (Thanks, Kara for introducing it to me through this paper!) I found telicity very interesting as I have never realized before that in English marking the object as countable makes such a difference, e.g. denotes telic/atelic events. I suppose this is due to my L1 Indonesian which does not have articles (definite/indefinite). Speaking of which, it really surprised me to learn that Slavic languages, including Russian, are also article-less. And actually Indonesian also has an exhaustive list of perfective prefixes and suffixes which L2 Indonesian learners also struggle to master. I’ve always interested in Russian. Maybe this should be the next language I have to learn. It would be interesting to see how an L1 Indonesian would acquire this language considering the similarities.
I found this article helpful in helping me to understand the concept of telicity. Though I am definitely still a little fuzzy when recognizing atelic/telic, it was interesting to see the differences between English and Russian and the individual language’s way of expressing the telic/atelic events. The Russian use of prefixes to denote the verbs meaning or duration is a concept so different from the English language that it is apparent why many Russian L2’s have trouble acquiring the language easily.
This article explores the concept of telacity in second language learners of Russian. Telacity is what marks as completed, anything that can have an end point linguistically, such as an action like eating an apple. In Russian, verb forms are often an indication of telacity vs. atelacity, specifically prefixes in verbs, of which there are 19 indicating different verb forms. I would imagine this would make learning Russian telacity from the perspective of a native English speaking perspective incredibly difficult as there are significantly fewer verb forms, few of which are indicated by prefix, however the study discussed in the article indicates the competence in native English speaking Russian learners in functional category acquisition.
This article was very interesting, because it explored telicity in Russian. A telic verb is one that shows an action having an endpoint such as “He ran a mile in an hour.” It is extremely different than that of English because Russian uses prefixes in the verb to denote it. In Spanish there is an example of this with Ser and Estar, and second language learners also struggle with being able to use the verbs in the correct situations.
I also think that it’s funny because many people (myself included) are unaware the telicity even exists because it’s not something we have to think about in our native language, we just naturally know when to use it.
Telicity? New for me! I had to look it up on the website first and read about it.
This study is about L2 learners whether they acquire linguistic competence of the aspectual functional category depending on two factors; knowledge on the effect of perfective prefixes and their meaning, and on lexical knowledge of perfective prefix morphemes. It is also referring to the issue of transfer from the native language that to be further discussed. English language uses the form of object to mark telicity. The issue of Russian learners of transferring this form from their L1 English to Russian was partially confirmed by this study. So the study is suggesting to more study and analyze the semantic effects of functional category in L2 acquisition as knowledge of semantic morphology mapping is necessary condition collective language acquisition. The other challenge is the memory and lexicon learning.
This was an excellent article! The article explained the different ways of expressing telicity in English, Russian and Finnish. Although there is a prevalent perception that Russian aspect is extremely difficult to learn, the study was able to proof that even the low proficiency learners were able to acquire the telicity marking mechanism in the L2. The author suggests that in reality the difficulty comes from the lexical learning task because it is not enough to learn the verbal root but it should be learned in clusters with telic and prefix and verb combinations and this is why this task would take time and effort hence the perception of difficulty.
Though I have trouble grasping the aspectual nature of telicity in Russian VPs in light of the presence or absence of a perfective prefix versus an object’s quantization, this article seems to prove that L2 Russian learners quickly acquire the ability to interpret telicity but not due to grammatical mechanisms but rather through the acquisition of morphological, semantic and syntactic reflexes. These results indicate that speakers were able to acquire the functional category associated with telic marking at even beginning levels of proficiency. The perceived difficulty of learners understanding and using telic verbs lies rather in the learning “the lexical items signaling telicity†instead of the “grammatical mechanisms of telicity markingâ€.
Somehow, I am just not grasping telicity. I’ve read through the author’s description a few times and hunted around Wikipedia and the internet but it’s not sticking. Err, hopefully I’ll just wake up and understand it? That aside, I found it interesting that even low-intermediate level learners had a good grasp on the grammar aspect of telicity and it was implied that it was the lexical aspect that was difficult.
I had a difficulty on understanding the concept of telicity so that I have to make it clear. I am interested in Russian itself. It is because Russian is considered as a difficult language to learn for Japanese and same for English speakers.
From what I could gather, this paper tried to assess the difficult L1 English learners of Russian had difficulty acquiring the concept of telicity. The author comes to the conclusion that this difficulty is on the lexical level rather than the grammatical level. In English, telicity is expressed in the quantification of the object (one of the ex. in the study was “cake” vs “the cake” or “a piece of cake”). In Russian, however, telicity is expressed by adding 1 of 19 perfective prefixes to the verb. So even if the object is quantified in a sentence, that sentence can still be atelic, something English speakers must grapple with when learning Russian.
The author then goes on to discuss perfectivity in relation to telicity, which she says is a “far from straightforward” relationship with one another, since not all perfective prefixes necessarily denote telicity. This is something I think I’d like a little more clarification on though.
This paper is about the competence of Russian L2 speakers on interpreting verb telicity. Low-intermediate speakers displayed L1 transfer with speakers interpreting the verb as telic where there was counted or demonstrative noun. Higher-level speakers did not rely on the noun, but did not allow the same range of interpretations preferring the atelic interpretation when native speakers allowed the telic and atelic interpretations. However, the higher-level speakers had native-like competence with interpreting perfective and imperfective verbs. This study highlights the difference between competence and performance.
I also had a difficult time fully grasping telicity. However, I was very intrigued by the author’s results, which showed that learners across all levels were able to grasp the concept. In particular, I found it interesting that the advanced and high intermediate level learners of Russian had results on perfective sentences that were indistinguishable from those of Native Speakers.
Being not from linguistics background, I honestly had never heard of telicity until I read this article. (Thanks, Kara for introducing it to me through this paper!) I found telicity very interesting as I have never realized before that in English marking the object as countable makes such a difference, e.g. denotes telic/atelic events. I suppose this is due to my L1 Indonesian which does not have articles (definite/indefinite). Speaking of which, it really surprised me to learn that Slavic languages, including Russian, are also article-less. And actually Indonesian also has an exhaustive list of perfective prefixes and suffixes which L2 Indonesian learners also struggle to master. I’ve always interested in Russian. Maybe this should be the next language I have to learn. It would be interesting to see how an L1 Indonesian would acquire this language considering the similarities.
I found this article helpful in helping me to understand the concept of telicity. Though I am definitely still a little fuzzy when recognizing atelic/telic, it was interesting to see the differences between English and Russian and the individual language’s way of expressing the telic/atelic events. The Russian use of prefixes to denote the verbs meaning or duration is a concept so different from the English language that it is apparent why many Russian L2’s have trouble acquiring the language easily.
This article explores the concept of telacity in second language learners of Russian. Telacity is what marks as completed, anything that can have an end point linguistically, such as an action like eating an apple. In Russian, verb forms are often an indication of telacity vs. atelacity, specifically prefixes in verbs, of which there are 19 indicating different verb forms. I would imagine this would make learning Russian telacity from the perspective of a native English speaking perspective incredibly difficult as there are significantly fewer verb forms, few of which are indicated by prefix, however the study discussed in the article indicates the competence in native English speaking Russian learners in functional category acquisition.
This article was very interesting, because it explored telicity in Russian. A telic verb is one that shows an action having an endpoint such as “He ran a mile in an hour.” It is extremely different than that of English because Russian uses prefixes in the verb to denote it. In Spanish there is an example of this with Ser and Estar, and second language learners also struggle with being able to use the verbs in the correct situations.
I also think that it’s funny because many people (myself included) are unaware the telicity even exists because it’s not something we have to think about in our native language, we just naturally know when to use it.
Telicity? New for me! I had to look it up on the website first and read about it.
This study is about L2 learners whether they acquire linguistic competence of the aspectual functional category depending on two factors; knowledge on the effect of perfective prefixes and their meaning, and on lexical knowledge of perfective prefix morphemes. It is also referring to the issue of transfer from the native language that to be further discussed. English language uses the form of object to mark telicity. The issue of Russian learners of transferring this form from their L1 English to Russian was partially confirmed by this study. So the study is suggesting to more study and analyze the semantic effects of functional category in L2 acquisition as knowledge of semantic morphology mapping is necessary condition collective language acquisition. The other challenge is the memory and lexicon learning.
This was an excellent article! The article explained the different ways of expressing telicity in English, Russian and Finnish. Although there is a prevalent perception that Russian aspect is extremely difficult to learn, the study was able to proof that even the low proficiency learners were able to acquire the telicity marking mechanism in the L2. The author suggests that in reality the difficulty comes from the lexical learning task because it is not enough to learn the verbal root but it should be learned in clusters with telic and prefix and verb combinations and this is why this task would take time and effort hence the perception of difficulty.