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Résumé : |
This paper presents an ongoing corpus-based study on the use of past tense forms in narratives produced by native Spanish (L1) speakers and francophone learners of Spanish as a second language (L2). The project is guided by two main objectives. First, it seeks to better understand the developmental progression of past tense usage from a semantic-pragmatic perspective, emphasizing the role of context in the use of verbal forms. Particular attention is paid to how learners progressively mobilize verbal forms to express temporal, aspectual, and interpretative distinctions in narrative contexts, from lower proficiency levels (A2) to near-native competence. In this perspective, tense is analyzed as part of a broader system in which meaning emerges from the interaction between morphology, lexical aspect, argument structure, and discourse function. Second, the project aims to generate both quantitative and qualitative data to support the future development of automatic analysis models capable of integrating morphosyntactic and semantic-pragmatic dimensions. To this end, a large corpus of L1 and L2 Spanish narratives is being compiled from university language courses in Quebec, complemented by data from existing learner corpora such as CEDEL2.
The theoretical framework is based on the Function-meaning-form model (Cruz Enríquez, 2019), which integrates insights from functional linguistics (M. Halliday, 1985; M. A. K. Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), and enunciation theory (Weinrich, 1973). The model accounts for three key dimensions in the interpretation of verbal forms: tense, grammatical aspect, and lexical aspect, as well as distinctions between narrative and commentative discourse.
Methodologically, the project adopts a hybrid approach combining automatic and manual annotation. The corpus is first processed using Python and SpaCy to extract morphosyntactic information, including clause structure, verbal forms, and temporal markers. Additional rule-based procedures and lexical resources are used to approximate higher-level categories, such as process type and narrative function. Process type is partly informed by data from the ADESSE database (García-Miguel, 2002), which provides detailed syntactic-semantic information on Spanish verbs, including their classification into process types and their argument structure patterns. This resource allows us to associate verbal forms with typical semantic classes (e.g. material, mental, perceptual processes) and to consider verb–argument combinatorics when approximating lexical aspect and meaning in context.
In a second stage, manual annotation is carried out to validate and refine the automatic output, focusing on semantic-pragmatic interpretation, ambiguity resolution, and error analysis. The annotation scheme is iteratively improved as new patterns and sources of error are identified. Native speaker data are analyzed first, followed by advanced learners and progressively lower levels, enabling a stepwise refinement of both the analytical framework and the annotation procedures.
Results from the first stage of analysis are drawn from a manually annotated subset of approximately 27,000 words, consisting of oral and written narratives produced by 20 native speakers and 20 advanced L2 learners in an elicited storytelling task based on a film excerpt. This initial dataset constitutes the first stage of the broader corpus currently under construction and serves to guide the development of the annotation scheme and subsequent large-scale analyses. Bayesian mixed-effects models reveal systematic differences between groups in the distribution of past tense forms in background contexts.
For the expression of progressive meaning, L2 learners show a higher probability of using analytic constructions (e.g. estaba cantando, cantando), whereas native speakers favor the imperfect (cantaba), particularly in contexts introduced by perception verbs such as ver (e.g., Vio que la chica robaba una barra de pan), thereby exploiting its polysemy across discourse contexts. For the expression of anteriority in the background, learners tend to rely more on pluperfect forms (había cantado), while native speakers extend the use of the preterite (e.g. Dijo que la chica robó un pan) to this temporal relation. Effects of modality (oral vs written) appear comparatively weak. Overall, these findings suggest that observed differences between advanced learners and native speakers are better explained in terms of differences in the discourse-pragmatic control of verbal polysemy than by purely morphosyntactic limitations.
These results inform the next stage of the project, since the manual analysis makes it possible to identify general tendencies and systematic differences between groups in the way temporal relations are expressed. These observations help anticipate the kinds of patterns that need to be captured in a hybrid or automatic approach, especially when dealing with learner data across proficiency levels. This provides a basis for developing more robust procedures for the automatic analysis of tense–aspect usage in L1 and L2 narrative corpora.
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