U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Volume 10.1, 2004

This paper is concerned with the acquisition of passive constructions in Russian. First, we present previously unreported spontaneous speech data from Russian children and demonstrate the existence of an asymmetry in the acquisition of imperfective and perfective passives. We then provide an explanation for this asymmetry that relies on the maturation of the (subject; object) A-chains account (Borer and Wexler, 1987, 1992; Babyonyshev et al., 2001). Finally, we describe the properties of long passive forms in these child data and show that the lack of long passives in child speech in conjunction with the reported aspectual asymmetry can be best accounted for within the framework of (subject; object) A-chain maturation rather than the 8-role transmission theories (e.g., Fox and Grodzinsky, 1998)