L2 acquisition of temporality: Findings from a corpus based study of the grammatical encoding of past time

Authors

  • Ann-Kristin Helland Gujord University of Bergen

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15845/bells.v6i0.809

Keywords:

L2 acquisition of temporal morphology, the Aspect Hypothesis, L1 influence, Norwegian learner corpus (ASK)

Abstract

The article presents a study that investigates the role of verb semantics (the Aspect Hypothesis) and L1 influence in texts from a learner corpus (Norsk andrespråkskorpus, ASK) that were written by 73 Vietnamese and 88 Somali learners of Norwegian. The main structures addressed are the preterite and the present perfect. There are two key findings. First, the Aspect hypothesis is not corroborated because lexical-aspectual influence is not detected. Second, the learner’s L1 is found to affect the acquisition process. The detected L1 effects agree with previous studies documenting that the learner’s L1 can affect the acquisition of temporal morphology and, moreover, that the perfect category in many cases is involved. Although the lack of support for the Aspect Hypothesis can partially be explained in terms of data type, it is suggested that the findings point to the importance of testing the hypothesis on other types of data besides those usually exploited.

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Published

2015-05-30

How to Cite

Gujord, Ann-Kristin Helland. 2015. “L2 Acquisition of Temporality: Findings from a Corpus Based Study of the Grammatical Encoding of past Time”. Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies 6 (May). https://doi.org/10.15845/bells.v6i0.809.