Abstract

This article reports on a study examining the tense and aspect morphology in oral narratives from L1 English L2 learners and heritage speakers of Korean, focusing on the relative contribution of lexical and discursive meaning in non-European languages by comparing the predictions of Discourse Hypothesis and Aspect Hypothesis. We also examine heritage speakers’ acquisition to discover whether an early age of acquisition, despite significant attrition later in life, leads to more native-like attainment of Korean. Unlike previous studies, our results suggest that discursive factors play a more significant role than lexical factors in determining the tense/aspect choice, and that temporal categories are interpreted indexically in the early stage of development.

Full Text
Published version (Free)

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call