Lexical Aspect and Auxiliary Selection in Italian Learner Corpora

Abstract

The Auxiliary Selection Hierarchy Hypothesis (henceforth ASH, Sorace, 1995a; 2000; 2004) correlates the aspectuality (meant as lexical aspect or Aktionsart) of predicates with the selection of avere or essere as auxiliary verbs. This hypothesis also predicts with which verbs the correct auxiliary will be acquired first by foreign learners. This article explores whether learners are equipped to figure out the aspectuality of L2 predicates and to use this semantic notion in order to target the right auxiliary. A sampling from Italian learner corpora shows a non-negligible percentage of errors and omissions of the auxiliary of so-called "core verbs". This percentage possibly increases in L2 predicates whose actional content is unstable and difficult to detect and appears to remain higher than expected in intermediate and in advanced learners. If one can move away from important factors such as the kind of elicitation-task and L1 pressure on performance data, there may exist a "period of latency" during which learners find hard to recognize, or even fail at recognizing verb actionality because of the interaction with the tense-aspect system and with other pragmatic factors. Presumably, when this period is over, the ASH would account for how verb aspectuality also results in split intransitivity in performance data . If this view is correct, the predictive validity of the ASH could be postponed in the learning process or - alternatively - it should not always be expected to be indisputably confirmed by performance data. In the event of which, the expression "primacy in acquisition" could be defined in more abstract terms as "primacy of representation rules" and not necessarily in terms of "emergence in data".