Marking Past Tense in Second Language Acquisition

<p>This book presents an analysis of the difficulties faced by native speakers of English in the learning of Romance languages and in so doing proposes a comprehensive model of the acquisition of tense-aspect marking. 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 monograph proposes a new model for examining tense-aspect marking in second language acquisition which reconciles competing alternative hypotheses. <p/>This comprehensive account will be of interest to academics researching second language acquisition and applied linguistics.</p>