This study examines the second language acquisition of Spanish past tense morphology by three groups of English speakers (beginners, intermediates and advanced). We adopt a novel methodological approach – combining oral corpus data with controlled experimental data – in order to provide new evidence on the validity of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH) in L2 Spanish. Data elicited through one comprehension and three oral tasks with varying degrees of experimental control show that the emergence of temporal markings is determined mainly by the dynamic/non-dynamic contrast (whether a verb is a state or an event) as beginner and intermediate speakers use Preterit with event verbs but Imperfect mainly with state verbs. One crucial finding is that although advanced learners use typical Preterit–telic associations in the least controlled oral tasks, as predicted by the LAH, this pattern is often reversed in tasks designed to include non-prototypical (and infrequent) form–meaning contexts. The results of the comprehension task also show that the Preterit-event and Imperfect-state associations observed in the production data determine the interpretation that learners assign to the Preterit and the Imperfect as well. These results show that beginner and intermediate learners treat event verbs (achievements, accomplishments and activities) in Spanish as a single class that they associate with Preterit morphology. We argue that dynamicity contrasts, and not telicity, affect learners’ use of past tense forms during early stages of acquisition.

Abstract. This paper argues for a constructionist approach for Aspect by exploring the idea that viewpoint aspect does not exert any altering force on the situation aspect properties of predicates. The proposal is developed by analyzing the point of view where conflicts between situation and viewpoint aspect have been argued to appear in previous literature, namely, the imperfective. The paper focuses on the syntax and semantics of the imperfective, which has been attributed a coercer role as a de-telicizer and de-stativizer in the progressive reading, and as a de-eventizizer in the so-called ability (or attitudinal) and habitual readings. This paper proposes that this is not necessary and provides a unified semantics for the imperfective preserving the properties of eventualities throughout the derivation. The article defends that the semantics of viewpoint aspect is encoded in functional heads containing interval-ordering predicates and quantifiers. This richer structure allows us to analyze aspectual forms with in principle contradictory content such as perfective and progressive, which sheds light onto other issues such as the understanding of non-culminating accomplishments. The proposed syntax is argued to have a corresponding explicit morphology in languages such as Spanish and a non-differentiating one in languages such as English, while the syntax-semantics underlying both of these languages is argued to be the same.

This study presents new empirical evidence on the L2 acquisition of Spanish SV-VS contrasts, a syntax-pragmatics interface phenomenon. Results from a context-dependant preference task involving unergative and unaccusative verbs in different focus situations (broad and narrow focus) reveal that beginner and intermediate English speakers prefer SV in all contexts. In contrast, advanced learners, who clearly know that VS is possible in Spanish, show a pattern of optionality with unergative verbs (in both broad and narrow focus contexts), whereas VS is correctly preferred with unaccusative verbs in both broad and narrowly-focused contexts. We argue that these results can be explained by a representational deficit according to which the VS order is overgeneralized to unergative verbs regardless of the discursive situation. We argue that learners' overuse of VS structures is exacerbated by the lack of clear evidence for the use of SV and VS forms in the native input.

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This study investigates the acquisition of the Spanish Imperfect by 60 English learners of Spanish at three different proficiency levels (beginner, intermediate and advanced). Two oral production tasks and one interpretation task show that although the Imperfect is used from early on, the full array of interpretations associated with this form (habitual, continuous and progressive) is not completely acquired even at advanced levels. Learners accept the Imperfect in imperfective contexts but have problems rejecting the Preterit. This problem persists even at advanced levels in continuous contexts. The continuous is conveyed in English by Past Tense, which is used in both perfective and imperfective contexts, whereas in Spanish only the Imperfect is appropriate. We argue that the incorrect low rejection of the Preterit signals a mapping problem of aspectrelated features present in both English and Spanish onto a new form (the Imperfect). These results support the problematic nature of feature reassembly in the acquisition of the Spanish Imperfect by English speakers.