The effect of core aspectual contrasts in context-rich situations versus prototypical
... The main argument is that non-native speakers do not acquire the core.
Mapping aspectual meanings throughout L2 development: The effect of core aspectual contrasts in context-rich situations versus prototypical contrasts in context-poor situations Rafael Salaberry University of Texas-Austin
English native speakers typically have difficulty understanding the subtle nuances of meaning of aspectual contrasts in the Romance languages (e.g., Preterite and Imperfect) in contextually complex situations (e.g., Salaberry, 2008; Salaberry and Granda, forthcoming). This difficulty is possibly associated with the lack of ultimate attainment in an area of grammatical knowledge that touches on more than just morphology, but semantics and discourse knowledge as well. In this paper, I will assess the relevance of several theoretical proposals that have been advanced to describe the knowledge that native speakers develop about aspectual interpretations, and how this knowledge may differ from the one displayed by non-native speakers in both interpretation and production tasks. The main argument is that non-native speakers do not acquire the core conceptualization of aspectual contrasts represented through inflectional morphology (cf. Slobin, 1996), thus they do not reach ultimate attainment. As they gain more experience with the target language, non-natives develop an increasingly accurate system of proceduralized knowledge (e.g., DeKeyser, 2009; Paradis, 2009) that allows them to track target-like selections of aspectual markings based on probabilistic frequencies associated mostly with lexical aspectual values (cf. Ellis, 2005, forthcoming), and to some extent, discourse grounding (cf. Salaberry, 2011). The key factor that determines the above-mentioned distinct sequence of developmental stages is the degree of contextualization of specific situations that, in turn, brings about the selection and use of specific aspectual contrasts. In this respect, it is generally assumed that the selection of, for instance, Spanish Preterite or Imperfect becomes more ambiguous as we continue to add additional layers of contextual information to any given situation (i.e., context-rich). Thus, the Aspect Hypothesis for instance, claims that learners move along a developmental sequence defined by core aspectual values in the beginning stages of acquisition to more idiosyncratic markings based on expanded contexts of reference in more advanced stages. On the contrary, I will argue that the more context we add to a situation the more relevant it is to rely on the core aspectual values of perfective and imperfective meanings (cf. Binnick’s 1991 invariant meanings). Alternatively, the more decontextualized the situation (i.e., context-poor), the more likely it is that selections of perfective and imperfective markings will be guided by prototypical selections associated with frequency effects (contrary to main tenets of the Aspect Hypothesis, for instance). The latter seems to be the strategy that most non-natives seem to follow. Furthermore, level of contextualization is a methodological criterion that may account for (apparently) contradictory empirical findings. The main object of this paper, thus, is to define as precisely as possible the core concepts of perfective and imperfective markings (cf., Langacker, 1999; Michaelis, 2004) in order to determine the methodological factors that will allow us to falsify the main tenet of the proposed developmental hypothesis of acquisition of aspectual knowledge. For that purpose, the analysis will selectively focus on the discussion of two topics that provide a good testing ground for the proposed distinction to be made between context-rich and context-poor situations: agencyanimacy effects and iterativity-habituality. For instance, several researchers have argued that
agency and animacy have an effect on the use of Spanish past tense markers. Thus, DoizBienzobas (1995) proposes that the subject (the letter) in sentence (1a) is perceived as uttering the words of how much he loved the speaker; thus the Preterite is not pragmatically feasible. (1a)
La carta decía/*dijo lo mucho que me quería. The letter said-IMP/*PRET how much he loved me.
When the Imperfect is used, however, it is proposed that the predicate does not designate an actual occurrence or a past activity and, consequently, the subject does not take an agentive role. Nevertheless, a minimal lexical variation of the predicate used in the example above shows that the option with the Preterite is actually acceptable and grammatical as shown in (1b): (1b)
La carta estipuló/describió lo mucho que me quería. The letter stated/described-PRET how much he loved me.
Similarly, Slabakova and Montrul (2007) argue that the use of the Preterite is dependent on the animacy of the subject: (2a)
*El río corrió (PRET) / Roberto corrió (PRET) por la montaña. *The river ran / Roberto ran through the mountain.
However, this is not necessarily the case if adequate contextual support is given. Thus, if we provided additional plausible contextual information we could assume that the bed of a river had been dry and that the gates of a dam were open to let the river run again. In such case, it would be perfectly acceptable to use the Preterite as shown in (2b): (2b)
El río corrió (PRET) por la montaña. The river ran through the mountain.
The analysis of examples such as the one described above show that animacy and agency do not necessarily determine the grammaticality of the Preterite. Thus, previous proposals have been only half-right given that the Preterite is only unacceptable in specific contextual conditions. Even though most likely contextual conditions favor the Imperfect, native speakers accept the use of the Preterite given the relevant (more specific) context. Such nuanced situations require that speakers rely on the core meanigs of aspect in order to arrive to the right selection of aspectual markers. In my discussion, I will review data that show that L2 learners do not seem to rely on the values of core aspectual meanings to make aspectual selections, but rather they rely on probabilistic, frequency-based information which, in many cases, happens to be limited in range of contextualization.
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