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Verb semantics and the acquisition of tense‐aspect in L2 English
Author(s) -
Housen Alex
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
studia linguistica
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.187
H-Index - 28
eISSN - 1467-9582
pISSN - 0039-3193
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9582.00064
Subject(s) - morphophonology , linguistics , verb , semantics (computer science) , past tense , psychology , morpheme , morphology (biology) , computer science , phonology , philosophy , biology , genetics , programming language
Studies on the L2‐acquisition of Tense‐Aspect ( TA ) have argued that the emergence and development of verb morphology is constrained by semantic‐conceptual prototypes in a way that coincides with the claims of the Aspect Hypothesis ( AH ) (Andersen & Shirai 1996). This paper presents results from a longitudinal study of the development of TA in L2 English which suggests that the influence of such prototypes is itself constrained by other factors, notably L1‐induced predispositions to mark specific temporal categories, the morphophonemic nature of different grammatical categories, and the nature of the processing mechanisms that operate in the learning of grammatical morphology.