Dynamics of verbal aspect in heritage Greek, Russian and Turkish

Aspect – the grammatical category associated with the internal temporal
properties of a situation – is obligatorily marked in the grammar of many languages.
Although it is used pervasively, innovative patterns commonly appear in situations
of language contact. Thus, aspect provides an ideal window into the dynamic
language patterns that occur in heritage grammars. This chapter reviews six studies
conducted in the context of the Research Unit Emerging Grammars that investigate
dynamic patterns in the use of aspect in monolingually-raised speakers of Greek,
Russian, and Turkish as well as heritage speakers of each of these languages living
in the US and Germany. Each study uses production and/or comprehension tasks to
explore one or more potential sources of these dynamic patterns, including
cross-linguistic influence, verbal morphology and markedness of the aspectual features,
formality (formal vs. informal), mode of expression (spoken vs. written), and
participant age. The results show several innovative patterns and some differences
in processing in heritage speakers, but largely find that monolingually-raised and
heritage speakers produce and process aspect marking in a qualitatively similar
way.