CROSSLIN3

All natural languages, whether or not they have a designated grammatical category conventionally referred to as progressive, can convey the idea that an event is progressing dynamically over a time frame opened up by an utterance (Mair 2012: 803). However, it is important to distinguish between a semantic-cognitive notion of progressive aspectuality, which is universal and transportable across languages, and the corresponding formal expression for this notion, i.e. the progressive aspect, found in various languages, which can be obligatory or optionally marked on lexical verbs or verb phrases. The present work aims at exploring how multilingual learners of English as Additional Language (and Third Language acquired at school) express the universal semantic-cognitive concept of progressive aspectuality in language contact situations. The analysis is conducted on learner corpus data (Leonide – Glaznieks et al. 2022) composed by lower-secondary school students living in a multilingual environment, i.e. South Tyrol, in which they are exposed in different ways to the official languages of the environment, i.e. Italian and German, alongside English as a school subject. The framework that has been applied is the Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) (Höder 2012, 2014, 2021) which postulates the existence of shared constructions (“form-meaning-function constellations”, Goldberg 2003) which speakers view as similar across multiple languages, termed 'diaconstructions,' and language-specific constructions, termed 'idioconstructions'. Learners’ multilingual constructicon with respect to the progressive aspectuality is modeled considering the three languages of the study, i.e. Italian, English and German, in an integrated network of dia- and idioconstructions organized along inheritance links connecting more specific and more schematic constructions to the supraordinate abstract concept of progressive aspectuality. Attention is also dedicated to cross-linguistic influence (CLI) phenomena, i.e. the influence resulting from similarities and differences between the target language and any other language that has been previously acquired, in light of the impact of learners’ background languages (Italian and German) when learning English. Since DCxG aims to model multilinguals’ linguistic knowledge in a socio-cognitively and dynamic realistic fashion (Höder et al. 2021: 314), the project considers learners’ language backgrounds as prototypical dominant language constellations (DLC) (Aronin 2006, 2016) embedded in the South Tyrolean environment.