The Acquisition of Aspectuality in Spanish: A Case Study
The Acquisition of Aspectuality in Spanish: A Case Study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36799/el.v10i2.166Keywords:
Acquisition, Aspectuality, Tenses, Semantic coordination, Pragmatic choiceAbstract
This paper presents the findings of a longitudinal case study that analyzes the acquisition and development of aspectuality in a Spanish-speaking child between the ages of 2;00 and 2;07. The analysis focuses on the interactions between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect in context, aiming to understand how these relationships emerge and evolve during the early stages of language development. Our results suggest a lexical coordination between the first verbs acquired and the grammatical tense in which they appear, with a stronger tendency in Achievement verbs, as shown by previous studies. Additionally, certain non-standard choices were identified, meaning cases where there is no strict semantic alignment between verb type and verb tense. These deviations appear to serve specific pragmatic-discursive functions, indicating that aspectual development is not solely governed by semantic principles but also by communicative and contextual factors.
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