The L2 Acquisition of Tense-Aspect Morphology (review)

This volume brings together the contributions of researchers who take generative, functional, and typological approaches to L2 (French, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, English, and Spanish) tense and aspect acquisition. It grows out of a colloquium in 1999 on ‘description and explanation in L2 acquisition of tense-aspect morphology: complementary perspectives’ organized by the editors at the 21st Annual Meeting of the American Association for Applied Linguistics. In addition to a substantive introduction by the editors (1–20) and an extensive overview of L1 tense and aspect acquisition (21–78) by Richard Weist, this book contains thirteen essays.

Roger Anderson (79–106) expands on the original aspect hypothesis to account for crosslinguistic variations and proposes six dimensions of the past developmental hierarchy: verb semantics, event type, realis-irrealis, pragmatic role, grounding, and discourse structure. He calls for future research to focus on the last three dimensions and to address questions such as how the learner discovers the form-function relation encoded by tense and aspect markers.

Colette Noyau (107–28) argues that the context of discursive activities and communicative constraints need to be taken into consideration to best account for the dynamic nature of tense-aspect acquisition and grammatical development in general.

Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig (130–54) highlights methodological issues and believes that understanding the method used by individual researchers is a prerequisite for valid interpretations of the findings reported.

Alex Housen (155–97) suggests, based on detailed analysis of longitudinal data on the acquisition of tense-aspect in L2 English by Dutch and French-speaking learners, that the effect of a learner’s native language, different processing mechanisms, and properties of tense-aspect markers in the target language may sometimes override the influence of inherent semantic principles.

Andreas Rohde (199–220) argues that the deviant use of verbal inflections in L2 children’s speech (L1 German, L2 English) are not compatible with the aspect hypothesis but may be explained by learner-internal factors (e.g. learner age) and learner-external factors (acquisition type, time of exposure, and input).

Anna Giacalone Ramat (201–47) examines L2 acquisition of Italian and argues for a prototypical approach and the influence of L1 in the acquisition of the classical three categories of temporality, that is, tense, aspect, and actionality.

Sonia Rocca (249–84) reports a longitudinal comparative study of three L1 Italian children learning L2 English and three L1 English children learning L2 Italian. The results are argued to support the aspect hypothesis.

Eva Wiberg (285–321) stands out in two respects. First, instead of testing the aspect hypothesis, she compares the use and function of future plans in dialogues produced by advanced Swedish learners of L2 Italian and by native speakers of Italian. Second, instead of examining the development stages, she focuses on the information structure in dialogic future plans.

María Kihlstedt (324–61) compares reference to past events in dialogue by Swedish advanced learners of French and by native French speakers, and claims that form-function relation in advanced interlanguage is not the same as in native use. She argues for a context-oriented approach and acknowledges the effects of linguistic, cognitive, and processing factors in the process of tense and aspect acquisition.

Roumyana Slabakova and Silvina Montrul (364–95) present a generative approach to the development of tense and aspect systems in interlanguage. Their conclusion is that English native speakers are capable of acquiring the semantic contrasts of Spanish preterite and imperfect aspectual tenses, a viewpoint aspect not instantiated in their native language.

Rafael Salaberry (397–415) goes back to test the aspect hypothesis and suggests that in the emergent linguistic systems, aspect markers do not necessarily precede the appearance of tense markers.

Patricia Duff and Duanduan Li (417–53) reveal English speakers’ acquisition and...