“To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: A time to be born, a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.” Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
1.1.1 The concept of time
Temporality is tacitly epitomized in the epigraph as the overpowering ruler of human experience: “tempus rerum imperator” ‘time, the emperor’, as prophesized by the Romans. In consequence, life cannot escape temporality, in fact, it is traversed by it from beginning to end. Our whole human existence is ruled by the temporal: human beings essentially experience the world in a temporal dimension through situations or eventualities that occur in the past, present, or future.
The notion of temporality relates to the universal notional category of time measured along the passage from birth to death and thereby experienced through a sequence of changes that is irreversible or unidirectional (Klein, 2009a). These changing situations can happen along a real temporal axis (i.e., “realis”, Bardovi-Harlig, 2000, p. 321), or can be thought of in terms of a hypothetical or imagined time (i.e., “irrealis”, Bardovi-Harlig, 2000, p. 321) as in “If I were you, I’d go.”
With respect to the theoretical underpinnings of time, there exists a “basic time structure” which is the foundation of the expression of temporality in most natural languages (Klein, 2009a; p. 26). This structure has six basic characteristics:
1. Segmentability: time consists of small segments such as spans or intervals.
2. Inclusion: the possibility that one-time span may be fully or partially included within another time span.
3. Succession: time spans may precede or follow each other (i.e., sequenced vs unsequenced situations).
4. Duration: time intervals may have short or long duration.
5. Origo (from Latin “origin”): the present moment, typically referred to linguistically as the “speech time” of a communicative situation. It constitutes the deictic center or anchoring point from where we experience situations as present, past and future. 1 In
1 Lyons (1977) discusses deixis in the following way:
“By deixis is meant the location and identification of persons, objects, events, processes and activities being talked about, or referred to, in relation to the spatiotemporal context created and sustained by the act of utterance and the participation in it, typically, of a single speaker and at least one addressee” (p. 637).
addition, this origo (or the “now”) is conceived more as a time interval that includes the moment of speech than as an instantaneous time point.
6. Proximity: time spans might be close or not to each other.
7. Lack of quality: temporal intervals do not have qualitative features. They are conceived as units defined by their temporal relations such as succession, overlap, simultaneity. In “realis” contexts, time has the major function of locating events somewhere along the timeline. In this sense, Reichenbach (1947) argues that there are three temporal points involved in the expression of eventualities in any given sentence: the point of speech (S) or origo, the point of the event (E), and the point of reference (R). Tenses in natural languages are constructs of these temporal points, which feature a direct two-way relationship, one between S and R and the other one between R and E, as well as an indirect relationship between S and E mediated by R. This mediator can be overtly marked through time adverbials or covertly expressed. For example, a sentence like “The bus had left” exhibits the use of the past perfect and clearly shows the interplay of the three time points, with the speaker’s speech time (S), the time of the event (E) being the exact moment the bus left the station, and the reference time point (R) being some other implicit past time/event between the speech and event time points (e.g., the time the speaker arrived at the station). Reichenbach’s taxonomy is important in showing that E and R are different in the case of the perfect tenses but the same in the case of the past simple/preterit, as shown by the schematization below. However, this taxonomy seems to work better with “single, punctual
situations” (i.e., the simple aspect) since it only accounts for temporal reference as opposed to aspectual contrasts (Dahl, 1985, p. 28).2
➢ E, R -S simple past ➢ E- S, R present perfect
Time is omnipresent in that it permeates the quotidian human experience. This omnipresence materializes via the human perception of the mutations brought about by time, the ever-changing situations around us. Time also materializes via the oral or written expression of temporality from two standpoints: 1. A pragmatic one, which serves to locate the human-related eventualities in time with respect to our present, as the deictic point, 2. A theoretical standpoint by which time can be conceptualized. In this last sense, the ability to express time “belongs to the most fundamental traits of human communication” and signals a crucial human capacity that implicates cognitive and linguistic processes (Klein & Li, 2009, p. 1). Critically, despite the universality and the centrality of time in our daily lives, the expression of temporal relations differs across natural languages and this fact is evidenced in their distinct use of different means of temporal expression. In other words, time is encoded differently across languages through a number of devices such as tense, (viewpoint) aspect, “Aktionsarten” (lexical aspect), temporal adverbials, particles, and discourse principles (Klein & Li, 2009). For example, whereas almost all Indo-European languages mark temporality grammatically by morphological means, Chinese uses
2 For a critical discussion of Reichenbach’s (1947) temporal points, see Comrie (1976). For a critical
assessment of both Reichenbach and Comrie’s conceptualizations of tense, and for a new improved theory that aims at overcoming the purported shortcomings of each author’s theory, see Declerck (1986).
temporal adverbials to mark time. In this sense, temporal expression is nearly obligatory in most languages “since it is structurally connected to the finite verb” (Klein, 2009b, p. 39).
The discussion below contains a description of the six major linguistic features involved in the expression of time cross-linguistically, (i.e., tense, lexical aspect, viewpoint/grammatical aspect, temporal adverbials, temporal particles, and discourse principles). This discussion aims at an understanding of the similarities and differences between Spanish and English and the impact these may have on the acquisitional process of L2 Spanish past temporality. It is known that adult L2 learners possess complete knowledge of an L1 when they start the L2 learning process. As a result, “previous language knowledge is an important source of influence on L2 acquisition, and this holds universally true of all L2 learners” (Ortega, 2009, p. 31). Knowing the specifics of the target language grammar that can be facilitated or hindered due to L1 influence can help us understand learner errors and predict where these errors might occur in the learning process, and in the case of instructed learners it can help in formulating teaching-learning strategies. However, L1 transfer (positive or negative) cannot be the sole explanation for IL development without consideration of the universal principles that affect natural languages. Finally, it has been argued that L1 influence cannot completely transform the route of L2 acquisition, but it can affect the pace of learners’ progress along their natural developmental paths (Ortega, 2009). Conversely, Tarone and Liu’s (1995) research on the development of questions in English found that every new stage of question formation appeared first at home, where acquisition was faster, and only later with the teacher. Long (1998) argues that this study is the only one that has shown that social context may affect rate and route of acquisition.
1.1.2 Devices in the expression of time
Temporality is a basal category of human experience and cognition, and all human languages have generated a large range of devices for its expression that involves the interchange of several means as noted by Klein, Dietrich, and Noyau (1993): lexical (e.g., inherent semantics of verbs), morphological (e.g., tense-aspect marking), syntactic (e.g., position of temporal adverbs), and pragmatic (e.g., discourse organization).
This section provides an in-depth discussion of the six major devices that are used in the expression of past temporality cross-linguistically in Spanish and English, discussed in Klein and Li (2009) and Klein et al. (1993). The discussion is deemed necessary due to the centrality that these devices have in this concept-oriented dissertation for the study of how an interacting system of past-time expression, rather than a single past form within an “inflexional paradigm bias” (Klein et al., 1993, p. 74), is acquired. Notably, the authors argue that this bias can yield an incomplete view of past-time expression that ignores the interaction between tense-aspect marking and other expressive means.
It has been shown that the adult second language learners will traverse three basic stages in their trajectory of past morphology acquisition: the pragmatic, the lexical, and finally the morphological (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Bardovi-Harlig & Comajoan, 2008). Hence, the first device to be discussed in the encoding of temporality, prior to morphology, is the discourse-pragmatic- one. Both native and second language learners rely on discourse information to express temporal reference. It has been found that L2 learners in their first pragmatic stage, rely on the interlocutor’s time frame in order to build their story (i.e., scaffolding; Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; or scaffolded discourse: Meisel, 1987, p. 212). Meisel explains that this stage is signaled by considerable interaction between the learner and the interlocutors, with the latter providing possible
constructions/forms for the former to choose from. The learners may also use constructions or rote learned forms which are put together according to pragmatic principles like “focus last” (Klein et al., 1993). A significant discourse strategy used by adult beginner learners is the “Principle of chronological order” or calendric ordering (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000; Klein, 2009b, p. 72; Klein & Purdue, 1997; Klein et al., 1993; Meisel, 1987; Schumann, 1987), by which the order of reported events corresponds to the order in which they happened.
The next temporal expressive device to be discussed, which follows the pragmatic stage, and one of the most elaborate according to Klein (2009b), is the use of lexical means such as temporal adverbials. The use of temporal adverbials in past-time marking has a two-fold function depending on the IL developmental point at which the learner is. Firstly, within the second lexical and pre-morphological stage, characterized by an absence of morphological marking, temporal adverbials have been observed to be the central device in the encoding of past temporality in beginning developmental ILs and in signaling the “temporal location of an event” (Shirai, 2009, p. 168). In this stage, the lexicon occupies the functional domain that is typical of verb morphology, hence, temporal adverbials have, in this stage, a greater functional load seeing that they receive all the pressure in the expression of past temporality. Secondly, the third stage, (i.e., the morphological per se) has shown differential uses of temporal adverbials: a. guide the learner in the right choice of past form (Izquierdo & Collins, 2008), b. be of crucial importance in emergent morphology, with decreasing reliance by higher proficiency level learners (Bardovi-Harlig, 1992b), and c. complement the use of past morphology with adverbials of incremental complexity as proficiency increases (Baker & Lubbers Quesada, 2011).
Adverbials can be realized through a number of forms such as simple adverbs (e.g., now), compound adverbs (e.g., afterwards), noun phrases (e.g., “last month”), prepositional phrases (e.g.,
“for a long time”), and subordinate clauses (e.g., “when they arrived”). From a functional standpoint, temporal adverbials are classified into sub-types that correspond to the exact roles they play in discourse. One major subtype is “position”, which locates a situation on the timeline, signaling a temporal relation of before, after, or simultaneous between two time periods. For example, in a sentence like “I will call you soon”, the adverb soon establishes a relation of “after” between the time of the situation instantiated by the verb call and speech time. Another adverb type is “duration”, which indicates the length of a situation in either a vague way (e.g., for a long time) or in a rather specific way (e.g., for an hour). A third type of temporal adverbial is frequency, whose main purpose is to “quantify over time spans” (Klein, 2009b, p. 66). These adverb types can express vague frequency (e.g., sometimes) or more specific frequency (e.g., once a week). The last temporal subtype of adverbial is that of contrast (e.g., still, already, again), which has a temporal connotation. For instance, in a sentence such as “Peter was already in Europe”, the temporal adverbial adds nuances of meaning: in this case the sentence means that at some specific time Peter was in Europe and at some time immediately before, he was there as well. When adverbial types are considered, adult second language acquisition research has shown that contrast adverbials are acquired last while position, duration and frequency types are acquired earlier (Klein et al., 1993).
The next, and likely one of the most investigated and cardinal devices in the expression of temporality, is tense, the linguistic correlate of time in numerous languages worldwide, which designates a grammatical category of the verb that allocates events to some point on the line of time (Bardovi-Harlig, 2000). As “grammaticalized location in time” (Comrie, 1985, p. 9), tense in a large number of languages is usually expressed by morphological means in the finite verb of the utterance/sentence. Furthermore, tense has been defined as a deictic grammatical concept relating
a situation to a reference or vantage point from which events are seen. This point or “deictic center” connects the time of an event to the speaker’s origo or to some other time or situation. The former type of connection is exemplified by ‘absolute tenses’ such as the English simple past, whereas the latter type corresponds to ‘relative tenses’ such as the past perfect (Comrie, 1985). When tense is further analyzed and compared in Spanish and English, a difference stands out. Whereas Spanish identifies three tenses, (i.e., past, present, future), English recognizes only two, (i.e., present and past). Particularly, while Spanish exhibits differing morphological marking for the three tenses (e.g., amo ”I love”, amé “I loved”, amaré “I will love”), English formally marks only the present and past (e.g., loves, loved) and expresses future time through lexical expressions (e.g., “am going to + infinitive”) or modal auxiliary verbs (e.g., “I will love you”). In addition, Spanish verbal morphology encodes not only tense but also person and number; hence, each person in the plural and singular will utilize a different verbal inflection across tenses (e.g., amé “I loved”; amó “he/she loved”; amamos ‘we loved’). Finally, the Spanish verbal inflections also vary according to the verbal paradigm i.e., according to the verb endings (i.e., verbs that end in -ar, -er, or -ir). Table (1-1) below shows the distinct verbal inflections of the Spanish preterit across each verbal paradigm, as well as the encoding of person and number, and the corresponding English forms.
Table 1-1. Spanish preterit conjugation across verbal paradigms.
Person/number Verbal paradigms: preterite forms
Singular -ar -er -ir
1st person amé ‘loved’ sentí ‘felt’ viví ‘lived’
2nd person amaste ‘loved’ sentiste ‘felt’ viviste ‘lived’
3rd person amó ‘loved’ sintió ‘felt’ vivió ‘lived’
1st person amamos ‘loved’ sentimos ‘felt’ vivimos ‘lived’
2nd person amaron ‘loved’ sintieron ‘felt’ vivieron ‘lived’
3rd person amaron ‘loved’ sintieron ‘felt’ vivieron ‘lived’
Another equally important device in the expression of temporality is aspect, “a semantic property of sentences which serves to present the situation talked about in a certain perspective” (Smith, 1983, p. 480). This definition describes the concept “sentential aspect”, which is a combination of situation aspect (i.e., type of situation or the inherent lexical aspect of verbs, e.g., states versus events) and type of perspective, also known as viewpoint aspect (i.e., complete versus incomplete situation) (Smith, 1983, p. 480). Specifically, sentential aspect conveys the sentence- level point of view of an eventuality and is signaled by either a single verb form (e.g., run) or the verb constellation (i.e., the composite lexical and grammatical forms such as the verb, complements, and adverbs such as “run a marathon”) (Smith, 1995, 1997; Verkuyl, 1972). In a similar vein, Klein (1994a) defines aspect as “the different perspectives which a speaker can take and express with regard to the temporal course of some event, action, process, etc.” (p. 16). The notion of aspect is thus intimately related to the concepts of time, “situation structure” (e.g., states versus events; Smith, 1991, p. 3) and viewpoint: the speaker’s choice of perspective (viewpoint) regarding situations (situation structure) as temporally complete or not (time). In other words, aspect and/or aspectual meaning is the choice of standpoint adopted by the speaker when presenting eventualities, a standpoint that is observable through the choice of the kind of
presentation (i.e., perspective) of the “situation-type” (Smith, 2003, 1983), as either temporally bounded, complete, terminated or temporally unbounded, incomplete, or continuing.3
Smith (1997) argues that viewpoints are similar cross-linguistically, yet not identical. Viewpoint aspect (also traditionally called grammatical aspect since it is usually encoded in grammatical morphology; Li & Shirai, 2000; Salaberry, 2017; Shirai, 1991) can thus be classified into “perfective” and “imperfective” meanings. The former presents events from an outer perspective, as a whole, spanned in their entirety, and from beginning to end. The latter presents events from an interior perspective (i.e., a focus on “the internal temporal structure of a situation”; Comrie, 1976, p. 24), spanning only a portion of them (Smith, 1991).
Comrie (1976) contends that the imperfective aspect is cross-linguistically polysemous, generally sub-divided into habitual and continuous meanings, the latter sub-divided into progressive/non-progressive, as shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1-1. Classification of aspectual distinctions (Comrie, 1976, p. 25).
3 For an alternative discussion that challenges the traditional definitions of time, tense and aspect, see Klein
(2009b). For example, the author argues that conceiving aspect as a non-time-relational category is misleading since talking about completion versus incompletion necessarily involves time. When an action is presented as completed, it
Comrie also argues that habituality and continuousness are not two distinct concepts but both “form a single unified concept”, as suggested by those languages that have a single category to mark imperfectivity, irrespective of the habitual/continuous sub-division (p. 26). Figure 1-1 illustrates the cross-linguistic taxonomy of aspect.
Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca (1994), on the other hand, discuss Comrie’s taxonomy of aspect and question its validity regarding the continuous and the progressive (dynamic verbs) and non-progressive (stative verbs) sub-divisions. Based on diachronic cross-linguistic research, the authors claim that a form for each node in Figure 1-1 above does not exist. In addition, they argue that there is no cross-linguistic evidence of a progressive gram-type that is restricted to dynamic verbs and a continuous gram-type which is not.
In the case of Spanish, imperfectivity is classified into three types: 1. “Progressive”, an open durative or instantaneous interval of an event that is not initial or final, i.e., (e.g., building a house versus winning a marathon), 2. “Iterative”, a series of events that happen over a time period, and 3. “Continuous”, a state of affairs that takes place throughout an interval of time where no change of state is reported (Nueva Gramática de la Lengua Española ‘New Grammar of the Spanish language’, 2010, p. 431).
With respect to aspect realization, Comrie (1976) argues that some languages use a single category to convey imperfectivity, other languages use distinct categories and others have a category that partially indicates imperfective meanings. For example, English has a separate habitual aspect (e.g., “he used to study here”) and a separate progressive aspect (e.g., “he was studying when I arrived”). However, the simple past in English is as well felicitous in habitual contexts, although less frequently and if aided by contextual cues. Conversely, aspectual differentiation in Spanish can be linguistically encoded through the dyadic gram opposition
preterit-imperfect. The latter form can cover all the sub-meanings of imperfectivity including progressivity, which can alternatively be expressed by the progressive form. The progressive aspect in English (Smith, 1983, 1997) has been oftentimes described in grammar books as a proxy to “imperfectivity”, or as an independent aspectual distinction. It is possible that the lack of an imperfect form in English to express imperfective meaning when compared to Spanish, may have led to nuanced classifications of aspect in the literature (e.g., language grammars). Notwithstanding the information in descriptive grammars, some scholars (e.g., Comrie, 1976; de Swart, 2012) claim that the progressive is a sub-type of the imperfective aspect as opposed to an aspect type on its own.
According to Comrie, some languages, like English, distinguish progressive from non-