Abstract
This paper examines the process of acquiring L2s that are closely related to the L1 through data on how adult French speakers learning L2 Spanish in a formal setting develop knowledge and use of past tenses in this L2. We consider the role of transfer and simplification in acquiring mental representations of the L2 grammar, specifically in the area of tense and aspect, and how learners deal with integrating grammatically encoded, lexical and discursive information, including mismatching feature combinations leading to particular inferential effects on interpretation. Data is presented on the Spanish past tenses (simple and compound past, pluperfect, imperfect and progressive forms) from two tasks, an oral production filmretell and a multiple-choice interpretation task, completed by learners at A2, B1, B2 and C1 CEFR levels (N = 20-24 per level). L1 influence is progressively attenuated as proficiency increases. Difficulties were not always due to negative L1 transfer, but related also to grammar-discourse interface issues when integrating linguistic and pragmatic information in the interpretation process. This has clear implications for the teaching of closely related languages: instruction should not only focus on crosslinguistic contrasts, but also prioritize uses requiring complex interface integration, which are harder to process.
Highlights
Past tenses in French and SpanishIn this paper we report empirical data on the acquisition, by instructed adult L1 French speakers learning Spanish, of the ability to use L2 tense-aspect morphology: simple past (SP), compound past (CP), imperfect (IMP), pluperfect (PLP) and progressive (PROG) forms
The A2 and B1 learner participants generally use the present indicative (PRES) as the main narrative tense, while they make an undifferentiated use of occasional CP/SP forms to convey the idea that the events are located in the past
At intermediate and higher levels, it can be an avoidance strategy
Summary
In this paper we report empirical data on the acquisition, by instructed adult L1 French speakers learning Spanish (at A2, B1, B2 and C1 CEFR levels), of the ability to use L2 tense-aspect morphology: simple past (SP), compound past (CP), imperfect (IMP), pluperfect (PLP) and progressive (PROG) forms. L1 French learning of L2 Spanish past tenses: L1 transfer versus aspect and interface issues in (2), the Spanish IMP is prone to prospective uses; they are not entirely ruled out in French, but the contexts allowing them are more restricted than in Spanish, and an auxiliary verb (in IMP) is often required in French (Azzopardi, 2011; Gosselin, 1999) These contrasts do not necessarily imply a crosslinguistic difference in the semantics of the IMP, but may rather be seen as a consequence of the overall diverging possibilities offered by the tense-aspect systems of each language (Amenós-Pons, 2015). The paper is organized as follows: Firstly, in Section 2, an overview of the empirical studies on the acquisition of L1 Spanish past tenses is offered; in Section 3, an introduction to the fundamental aspects of our own study is provided; in Section 4, we report on and discuss our results, finishing up with conclusions, limitations and suggestions for further research in Section 5, linking the experimental data with current theories on L2 acquisition by processing (Sharwood Smith & Truscott, 2014) and language/discourse-pragmatics interface issues
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