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The paper presents the results of a study investigating a possible influence of the viewpoint (perfective vs. imperfective) and lexical (telic vs. atelic) aspect of Polish verbs on the countability of eventive nominalizations ( substantiva verbalia ) derived from these verbs. Polish substantiva verbalia preserve many properties of the base verbs, including the eventive meaning and aspectual morphology. Native speakers of Polish rated the acceptability of nominalizations in count and mass contexts. An effect of both viewpoint and lexical aspect was found in mass contexts, where aspectually delimited (perfective, accomplishment) nominalizations were less acceptable than non-delimited (imperfective, state) nominalizations. In count contexts, only an effect of the lexical aspect was clearly present, with accomplishment nominalizations being more acceptable than state nominalizations. The nominalizations were overall rated as more natural in mass than count constructions, regardless of the aspect. The results indicate that aspect plays a role in establishing the countability of a word, but it does not fully determine it.

Bilingual settings are perceived as exemplary cases of linguistic diversity, and they are assumed to trigger cross-linguistic interaction. The rationale underlying this assumption is the belief that when more than one language is processed in a brain, this will inevitably affect the way in which linguistic knowledge is acquired, stored and used. However, this idea stands in conflict with results obtained by research on children acquiring two (or more) languages simultaneously. They have been demonstrated to be able to differentiate languages from early on and to develop competences qualitatively identical to those of monolinguals. These studies thus provide little evidence supporting the idea that bilingualism must lead to divergent grammatical development. The question then is what triggers alterations of bilinguals’ grammars, especially of the syntactic core, possibly resulting in non-native competences. This has been claimed to occur in the acquisition of second languages, weaker languages of simultaneous bilinguals, or heritage languages. These acquisition types differ from first language development in that onset of acquisition of one language is delayed or that the amount of exposure to one language is reduced. I will argue that age at onset and severely reduced amount of exposure are potential causal factors triggering divergent developments, whereas bilingualism on its own is not a sufficient cause of divergence.