| This research has as main purpose to examine and describe the L1 acquisition of grammatical structures of verb tense and aspect, with emphasis on the past tenses in Puerto Rican Spanish: the simple past tense and the imperfect. The research focuses on the distinction between the two forms of the past. This phenomenon has been studied, but it was not easy to reach agreement on what is acquired first: time or aspect. The analysis is carried out within a functionalist framework, which communicative orientation, allows to study the language acquisition process without separating the semantic and pragmatic aspects of the purely grammatical. To this end, we examine eighteen sections of the corpus collected in a longitudinal case study of a Puerto Rican girl (Hernandez Cabrera 2000-2003). The recordings were made weekly for a period of three years. We analyzed all expressions of the informant, which are products of natural and spontaneous communication, to account for the aspectual distinction in the past.;The results show that the girl does first temporary distinction than aspectuality distinction. The girl uses both forms of the past in two ways; in some cases to distinguish between consecutive verbs and stative verbs, and in a few cases to indicate location within the timeline. We give 'weight' to both types of analysis to conclude that the results that shed this research support the Hipotesis del tiempo no defectivo (Hypothesis of non-defective time), which postulates that the tense and aspect are acquired simultaneously because different classes of verbs and tenses appear at once. |
