Aspect in the acquisition of the Spanish locative paradigm by Italian L2 learners

Abstract

The present study investigates the development of the expression of the locative paradigm in the L2 Spanish of Italian-speaking learners. We investigate (i) whether the developmental stages proposed for English-speaking learners (VanPatten 1987; Perpiñán, Marín & Moreno Villamar 2020) hold for Italian-speaking learners; and (ii) whether Italian, a language that partially overlaps with the distribution of the Spanish copulas has a facilitative role in the process. 33 Italian-speaking learners of Spanish and 21 monolingual Spanish speakers completed a short proficiency test, an acceptability judgement task, and a picture matching task targeting these constructions. Results indicate that unlike what VanPatten (1987, 2010) has proposed for English-speaking learners of Spanish, Italian speakers do not present a delay in the acquisition of estar, but instead, it is overproduced in locative contexts from very early on. We argue that this overproduction of estar is due to the readily available mapping of ‘temporal boundedness’ with estar in the grammar of these L2 learners, whereas the presence of the feature ‘dynamicity’, even though it is relevant in the distribution of copulas in Italian, comes later in L2 development.