This study investigates grammatical aspect in Greek and English oral narratives produced by Greek heritage speakers in the United States, examining aspectual marking across the bilingual repertoire, patterns of cross-linguistic alignment, and morphological restructuring. Using 31 narratives from the Greek Heritage Language Corpus, the analysis addressed (a) the role of background variables, (b) default aspectual preferences, (c) cross-linguistic alignment between Greek and English, and (d) morphological variation relative to baseline Greek. Quantitative results revealed a strong preference for the perfective aspect in both Greek and English, suggesting that past-time reference is typically conceptualized as completed or bounded. Education was the only factor associated with aspectual choice, with more educated speakers producing more progressive forms in English; no effects emerged for age group, generational status, schooling context, or years of schooling in Greek. Qualitative findings identified a limited number of systematic morphological simplification and analogical leveling patterns, including overregularization, and occasional periphrastic forms consistent with restructuring and possible cross-linguistic alignment. The results indicate that heritage speakers maintain the core distinction between perfective and imperfective aspect, despite favoring perfective forms across both languages. Meanwhile, they show emerging tendencies toward more transparent and analytic realizations, although such patterns remain quantitatively marginal in the present dataset. Overall, the findings support the view that heritage grammars are systematic, adaptive, and resilient linguistic systems.
Dosi et al. (Tue,) studied this question.