Abstract
Abstract The aim of this work is to investigate the use of Spanish Preterit and Imperfect by English speaking learners of L2 Spanish following the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1996; Díaz, Bel, & Bekiou, 2008; Domínguez, Tracy-Ventura, Arche, Mitchell, & Miles, 2013; González, 2003, 2013; Montrul & Slabakova, 2002). The article studies how aspectual features bias Preterit and Imperfect in initial, intermediate and advanced learners. The results, based on an approximate binomial distribution analysis, confirm that Preterit is the preferred past, which supports L1 transfer (Salaberry & Shirai, 2002). The results also verify that Preterit is biased by dynamicity and punctuality at all levels. Telicity effects come into play in intermediate levels, while punctuality effects are reinforced in advanced levels. Stativity influences the use of Imperfect in intermediate level, which reveals that there are differences in the bias effect regarding proficiency level.
Highlights
Acquiring the aspectual difference between Spanish Preterit and Imperfect is a difficult process for L2 learners, for those with L1 English
2001; among others), this study does not take for granted Vendler’s (1957) typology, but it tests the effects of telicity, dynamicity and punctuality in the acquisition of Spanish past verbal morphology to further understand how aspectual features affect the use of Spanish grammatical aspect
Telicity effects become evident in intermediate levels, as expected because it interacts with animacy, specificity and inherent case
Summary
Acquiring the aspectual difference between Spanish Preterit and Imperfect is a difficult process for L2 learners, for those with L1 English. Our work does not assume Vendler’s typology, it contributes to this line of research to find out which aspectual features bias the use of the Preterit and the Imperfect in different proficiency levels (A2, B1, B2 and C1). This reasoning is based on the idea that L2 morphological variability is the result of reassembling lexical features in the target language, as stated by the Feature Assembly Hypothesis (Lardiere, 2009), and it aims to show that the interaction of interpretable features (animacy, specificity and telicity), and uninterpretable features (accusative) in VP complicates things for L2 learners (Guijarro-Fuentes, 2012)
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