Book Review: Telicity in the Second Language

Abstract

Slabakova sets off with the goal of presenting a detailed study of second-language (L2) acquisition of English telicity marking by native speakers of Bulgarian. To achieve her goal, Slabakova journeys through a large range of topics such as theories of aspect and theories of SLA, semantic and syntactic treatments of telicity, English and Slavic telicity marking, first-language and L2 acquisition of aspect, and of course her own experimental study of the L2 acquisition of telicity. The upfront proposal is to treat the distinction between English and Slavic realization of aspect as due to a parameter. According to this proposal, aspectual meaning in English is compositional, involving properties of a specific verb plus properties of the direct object that occurs with it. In Slavic languages, by contrast, aspectual interpretation is calculated based only on the properties of the verbal form. The main contribution of Slabakova's book, although not the only one, is the investigation into the access to Universal Grammar theories. To the extent that such matters can best be fared out with the help of language acquisition studies, especially experimental studies, Slabakova has made a significant contribution to the field.