Consequences of the comparative fallacy for the acquisition of grammatical aspect in Spanish

Abstract

This paper tackles the usefulness of comparing L2 learners against native speakers in empirical SLA studies focusing on grammatical aspect. Adapting the view that interlanguage grammars should be analysed in their own right instead of as a deficient form of the target, we show that expressing perspectivity (fulfilled by grammatical aspect markers) methodologically complicates the analyses of Grammaticality Judgment Tasks in aspect studies. For Spanish past tenses, we show that especially with items constructed as allegedly ungrammatical natives behave heterogeneously. This casts doubt on the question whether these data can be used as a baseline against which learners’ data could be compared. By analysing the interlanguage separately (not only in comparison to the controls), our findings among German learners of L2 Spanish suggest the use of the forms depends essentially on temporal markers which can be related to both their L1 lacking grammatical aspect and the pedagogical input. Crucially, though the interlanguage does not match the target (i.e., past tenses do not necessarily correlate with aspectuality), the systems are not chaotic but follow well-defined rules.