Marking Past Tense in Second Language Acquisition

Download or read book Marking Past Tense in Second Language Acquisition written by Rafael Salaberry and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2008-06-22 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book presents an analysis of the difficulties faced by native speakers of English in the learning of Romance languages. While L1 speakers of English may quickly learn to identify and to some extent, use the Spanish perfective and imperfective verb endings, the L2 representation of tense-aspect distinctions among both beginning and advanced learners requires a comprehensive multidimensional analysis. Through a detailed examination of new and existing empirical data, this book proposes a theoretical analysis of the L2 acquisition of tense-aspect marking along the lines of the claim of the default past tense hypothesis. This theoretical analysis serves to reconcile competing, alternative hypotheses and to highlight potential areas of future research. This comprehensive account will be of interest to academics researching second language acquisition and applied linguistics.