Metalinguistic transfer in Slavic intercomprehension: the case of verbal aspect

The present study evaluates the ability of a group of L1 Italian learners of L2 Russian to select the correct value of verbal aspect in L3 Ukrainian, a language they had no experience of, but which is lexically and grammatically close to Russian. In addition to a significant proportion of the lexicon, Russian and Ukrainian (both belonging to the East Slavic group) share numerous grammatical traits, including the systematic and lexicalized codification of aspect. For any verbal form, the appropriate aspectual marking – imperfective (ipf) or perfective (pf) – needs to be selected on the basis of the context (Zaliznjak & Šmelev 2000). The opposition between pf and ipf in Slavic languages differs markedly from that attested in other languages (Janda 2004): in Italian, to exemplify, verbal aspect is tied to the opposition between verbal tenses in the past. The proximity between Russian and Ukrainian represents fertile ground for intercomprehension, broadly defined as the possibility to use (i.e. understand and/or produce) a language that one has no direct experience of, but is closely related to a known language (European Commission 2012). The research question of the study is to what extent the knowledge of an L2 structure can be transferred to a new L3 (Marx & Mehlhorn 2010; Pančíková & Horák 2020; Saturno 2022). Specifically, the presence of positive transfer in the selection of verbal aspect would suggest that the learning of L3s can significantly benefit from existing knowledge of a related L2 (Bardel & Sanchez 2017), especially if the latter is typologically distant from the learners’ L1 and its mastering took significant time and effort (as is the case with L1 Italian and L2 Russian). 92 L1 Italian learners of L2 Russian filled in an online questionnaire (in three different versions) containing a Ukrainian text in which several verbs had been removed. The participants’ task was to select the form that they deemed most appropriate by answering a multiple-choice question presenting the imperfective and the perfective form of the verb. All gaps were verified with the help of a Russian-Ukrainian bilingual native speaker to make sure that only one aspectual value would be acceptable. To establish the baseline of the participants’ skills in L2 Russian, the participants also performed the same task on the Russian version of the text. The results show that while the accuracy of the participants’ responses in Ukrainian is significantly lower than in Russian, it is still well above chance, which suggests that indeed, the participants could transfer their knowledge of the Russian aspectual system to its Ukrainian counterpart.