Chapter 6. Research design: Operationalizing and testing hypotheses

Expanding the Definition of Aspect in L2 Acquisition: Assessing Advanced Levels of Competence to Understand Aspectual Knowledge

“…The problem, however, is that there is more than one definition of aspect. Or, at a minimum, even if there is agreement on the broad and comprehensive range of meanings conveyed by the construct of aspect (e.g., Binnick, 1991;Caudal & Roussarie, 2005;Comrie, 1976;Giorgi & Pianesi, 1997;Klein, 1994;Michaelis, 2004;Smith, 1997;Verkuyl, 1989Verkuyl, , 1993, only a sub-set of these meanings may have been considered relevant for the evaluation of developmental sequences of acquisition in specific studies of L2 acquisition (see Salaberry, 2013b for a review). To that effect, the focus on nonprototypical meanings requires that we clearly demarcate the semantics of aspect.…”

Enhancing metalinguistic knowledge

“…The main factors contributing to the difficulty of the Preterite/Imperfect are that (a) aspectual contrasts in Spanish are obligatorily marked; that is, when referring to past events, learners must choose between Preterite and Imperfect; (b) to appreciate a speaker's intended meaning, the learner needs to understand that aspectual interpretation is compositional: it depends on the whole verb phrase and other contextual information such as adverbials (Salaberry 2013); related to this, (c) grammatical information (past tense morphology) can override lexical information (the inherent semantic value of verbs); for example, while an event such as dormir (sleep) is atelic, the choice of the Preterite produces a telic interpretation: Juan durmió (pret) en el parque (Juan slept in the park/finished) as opposed to Juan dormía (imp) en el parque (Juan slept in the park/unfinished) (Domínguez et al, 2013;Salaberry 2011); (d) the meanings which can be conveyed by the Preterite/Imperfect are wide-ranging, going beyond (un)boundedness: habituality versus iterativity, genericity versus specificity, irrealis versus actual occurrence (Doiz-Bienzobas 1995). The resultant lack of transparency in form-meaning mappings leads to increased learning difficulty (Author 2009).…”