Temporal Relations in Learner Varieties: Grammaticalization and Discourse Construction

Works on temporality in the field of language acquisition have progressed considerably over the past few years, moving on from descriptions of the linguistic structure of learner varieties towards a more general concern for their dynamic nature, i.e. their developmental structure and factors relating to their restructuring. As far as the study of temporality is concerned, it has not only been a matter of looking in more detail at the different contextual factors in the morphologization of aspectual and/or temporal notions, but also tackling the development of learner varieties within a textual perspective, looking at the construction of temporal structures in discourse. The reason for this is that morphologization is best accounted for within the context of discursive activities and their communicative constraints on referenciation. This is what I aim to demonstrate here, rather than concentrating on the actual detail of the different processes in the development of inflectional morphology.