Abstract (eng)
The present study aims to investigate the development of temporal and aspectual distinctions in the acquisition of Italian as a non-native language. The conceptualisation of tense-aspect distinctions is seen as a component of the grammatical competence, defined as “knowledge of, and ability to use, the grammatical resources of a language” (Council of Europe, 2001, p. 112). Since competence is not directly observable, this study represents an attempt to infer competence from performance (Ellis & Barkhuizen, 2005, p. 6), and is based on the analysis of a learner corpus designed for studying the use of verbal morphology by plurilingual learners of Italian. The corpus is composed of 151 narrative texts, collected from learners enrolled in Italian language courses at the Institute of Romance languages at the University of Vienna.
The questions being looked into are how the tense-aspect system develops in the interlanguage and how the acquisition process is shaped by factors such as the lexical aspectual value of the predicates and discourse grounding, seen as “two manifestations of a single construct: a continuum of aspectual meanings” (Salaberry, 2011, p. 188).
The data presented in this study indicate that both lexical aspect and discourse grounding influence the distribution of verbal morphology in the interlanguage. Semantically congruent pairings of lexical aspect, verbal morphology and discourse grounding (e.g., telic predicates marked with perfective morphology in the foreground) are used more frequently and appropriately than less prototypical combinations (e.g., telic predicates marked with imperfective morphology in the background). The use of prototypical combinations increases alongside proficiency.