La gestione della temporalità negli scritti di apprendenti di madrelingua tedesca in Alto Adige/Sudtirolo

This study concerns the research field of Italian as L2 in a school learning context where the language of instruction (L1) is German, and it was conducted in the Autonomous Province of Bolzano / South Tyrol, a border area in Italy where three languages are in contact: German, Italian and Ladin. This is an empirical study which, after a detailed description of the sociolinguistic context, the learning context, the informants (at an advanced post-basic level) and the corpus (four different types of texts), focuses on the core of the research: the use of tense by students writing in Italian as L2. The verbal systems of L1 (German) and L2 (Italian) diverge considerably both in the quantity of forms and in their use, but it is clear that the critical point lies in the expression of aspectuality. Based on the contributions of Bertinetto and Weinrich, a textual perspective is used to analyze and comment which grammatical and lexical resources learners apply to temporally classify events in their writings.