Effect of Perfective Prefixes on Object Interpretation: A Theoretical and Empirical Issue*

This experimental study brings evidence from second language acquisition (L2A) to bear on a theoretical issue that has been called into question by native speaker judgments: the semantic effect Russian perfective prefixes have on object interpretation. In perfective sentences, article-less bare plural and mass objects are interpreted as denoting a specific quantity. Russian native speakers do not demonstrate sensitivity to this quantificational effect in the absence of context, while advanced and high intermediate learners do. It is proposed that Russian native speakers are aware of discourse-pragmatic word order effects capable of changing object interpretation, while learners rely solely on the grammatically encoded object-event homomorphism.

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