Influence of tense-aspect marking on the holistic perception of text quality in narratives by learners of Italian

The development of narrative skills is an essential element of language teaching, given that narrating is a fundamental human activity, a part of everyday social life (Lo Duca 2003; Blyth 2005). According to linguistic research on the concept of text and the characteristics of the narrative text type, a central criterion in the logical structuring of a narrative and the organization of its content is temporality (see Roggia 2010). In fact, the backbone of a narrative consists of a series of events, which follow each other in time and progressively modify the narrated world. The narration of the main events can be enriched by descriptions, flashbacks and flashforwards, which are of secondary importance compared to the events located on the main timeline. In other words, the building blocks of a narrative are interwoven by temporal relations. The domain of temporality is strongly related to the domain of aspectuality: temporality is concerned with the location of events on the timeline, while aspectuality refers to the internal temporal structuring and the temporal delimitation of events and situations (Comrie 1976; Dessì Schmid 2019). These two categories may interact in different ways, depending on the linguistic resources that codify them in individual languages. Cross-linguistic differences in the expression of temporal and aspectual information may have a significant effect on the speaker’s ability to narrate indifferent languages. For instance, speakers of Germanic languages learning a Romance language may find it difficult to mark the perfective and the imperfective aspect morphologically, given that their first language is more likely to convey this type of information by lexical and syntactic means or to leave the aspectual characterisation of situations open to both perfective and imperfective interpretations. In fact, such challenges have been well documented in the studies conducted over the last decades (see, for example, Comajoan 2005, 2006, 2019; McManus 2013, 2015; Salaberry 1998, 1999, 2011). Less is known about speakers of other languages, such as Slavic languages or Chinese. These groups of learners are of particular in- terest, given that their first language marks aspect systematically, but in a way that substantially differs from Romance languages, which makes 1:1 form-function re-mapping impossible. In addition to the lack of studies on non-Germanic languages, another missing piece of the puzzle is how the ability to convey temporal and aspectual distinctions influences the speaker’s ability to narrate, in terms of the overall perception of the quality of their narratives. The present study addresses this research gap by examining how the appro- priateness of tense-aspect marking in narratives written in Italian influences the overall perception of their quality in three groups of learners of Italian, with first languages that convey tense and aspect in substantially different ways (i.e., German, Slovak and Chinese).