This PhD project aims to investigate cross-linguistic influence (CLI) occurring in the acquisition of Tense/Aspect (TA) in multilingual learners of English as their third language.

Starting from Odlin’s (1989) definition of CLI as “the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously acquired”, this investigation aims to observe the influence of the two background languages (Italian and German) in multilingual learners acquiring English as L3.

The main area of interest to investigate CLI concerns Tense/Aspect (TA) acquisition, namely one of the most relevant aspect in which the three languages at issue (German, Italian and English) typologically differ.

In this sense, the prevalent theories concerning the acquisition of the TA system (the most widely discussed Aspect Hypothesis, Default Past Tense Hypothesis, …) in combination with the theories of CLI in Third Language Acquisition (L2 Status Factor Model, Cumulative Enhancement Model, …) will be tested and discussed.

The foundation of the project is represented by a sub-corpus of English texts taken from LEONIDE, a trilingual longitudinal data collection coming from lower secondary school learners and collected within the project "SMS – One school, many languages” (2015-2018), which was set up in the Province of Bolzano to establish multilingualism as an educational aim.