37.157, Books: Aspect and Temporal Relations: Palumbo (2025)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-37-157. Wed Jan 14 2026. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 37.157, Books: Aspect and Temporal Relations: Palumbo (2025)

Moderator: Steven Moran (linguist at linguistlist.org)
Managing Editor: Valeriia Vyshnevetska
Team: Helen Aristar-Dry, Mara Baccaro, Daniel Swanson
Jobs: jobs at linguistlist.org | Conferences: callconf at linguistlist.org | Pubs: pubs at linguistlist.org

Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

Editor for this issue: Mara Baccaro <mara at linguistlist.org>

================================================================


Date: 12-Jan-2026
From: Jan Martin [lotdissertations-fgw at uva.nl]
Subject: Aspect and Temporal Relations: Palumbo (2025)


Title: Aspect and Temporal Relations
Subtitle: Experimental Studies on Spanish as a Native and a Second
Language
Series Title: LOT Dissertation Series
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke
(LOT)
           http://www.lotpublications.nl/
Book URL: https://dx.medra.org/10.48273/LOT0703

Author(s): Luigi Palumbo

Paperback
ISBN: 978-94-6093-488-9
Pages: 307
Price: 41,00 euros

Abstract:

This thesis investigates how native and second language (L2) speakers
establish temporal relations in Spanish, integrating formal linguistic
theory with experimental evidence. Part I examines temporal
interpretation in complex (two-clause) sentences such as Mary said
that John was sick. In this so-called ‘past-under-past’ construction,
John’s illness may be understood as simultaneous with or anterior to
Mary’s report. Competing accounts have attributed the availability (or
lack thereof) of these readings either to Grammatical Aspect,
contrasting perfective and imperfective aspect forms in the embedded
clause, or to Lexical Aspect, distinguishing between stative and
eventive predicates. The studies reported in this part of the thesis
provide a systematic experimental test of these accounts with adult
native speakers of Spanish. This language explicitly marks perfective
and imperfective aspect across both stative and eventive predicates,
offering an optimal setting for disentangling the respective
contribution of Grammatical and Lexical Aspect to temporal
interpretation. Part II turns to L2 acquisition, investigating L1
English learners of Spanish. The experiments presented here
conceptualise the acquisition task as the reassembly of perfective and
imperfective features, and introduce temporal interpretation in
complex sentences as a novel testing ground of the extent to which
learners have acquired the ordering function of Grammatical Aspect. By
assessing interpretation in both simple (one-clause) and complex
sentences within the same participants, this work further examines
learners’ ability to distinguish aspect meanings across syntactic
structures, providing a comprehensive account of the challenges that
Grammatical Aspect poses in L2 acquisition.

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition

Subject Language(s): Spanish (spa)

Language Family(ies): Spanish based




------------------------------------------------------------------------------

********************** LINGUIST List Support ***********************
Please consider donating to the Linguist List, a U.S. 501(c)(3) not for profit organization:

https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=87C2AXTVC4PP8

LINGUIST List is supported by the following publishers:

Bloomsbury Publishing http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Cambridge University Press http://www.cambridge.org/linguistics

Cascadilla Press http://www.cascadilla.com/

De Gruyter Brill https://www.degruyterbrill.com/?changeLang=en

Edinburgh University Press http://www.edinburghuniversitypress.com

John Benjamins http://www.benjamins.com/

Language Science Press http://langsci-press.org

Lincom GmbH https://lincom-shop.eu/

MIT Press http://mitpress.mit.edu/

Multilingual Matters http://www.multilingual-matters.com/

Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG http://www.narr.de/

Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics / Landelijke (LOT) http://www.lotpublications.nl/

Peter Lang AG http://www.peterlang.com


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-37-157
----------------------------------------------------------