THE ACQUISITION OF LEXICAL AND GRAMMATICAL ASPECT. Ping Li and
Yasuhiro Shirai. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2000. Pp. v + 261.
$106.00 cloth.
This book covers everything related to aspect in the field of
language acquisition; I was amazed by how the authors managed to do
this in such a clear manner in only 261 pages. The book discusses
numerous topics related to the acquisition of aspect: from tense to
grammatical to lexical aspect, from nativist to functionalist
approaches, from a connectionist model to Universal Grammar, and from
first language (L1) to second language (L2). It also covers relevant
previous research in the acquisition of tense and aspect in Chinese,
English, and Japanese. Although the aim of the book is not an extensive
survey of the research done on aspect in all possible languages, given
the importance of the work done on aspect in Slavic languages, one
might have expected to see more discussion of this area.