ABSTRACT
Developments in theoretical linguistics, for example, the Minimalist Program, have highlighted the importance of interfaces, suggesting that syntactic derivations are driven by the necessity to satisfy certain interface conditions. Grammatical competence is the unconscious, implicit knowledge that a speaker has about language that comes from the module of the mind associated with the human language faculty. Pragmatics is informally defined as the real-world knowledge that speakers bring to the use of language. Grammatically-induced shifts signal aspectual transitions by means of overt grammatical elements. The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology and the question of how learners come to map form and meaning in the aspectual domain have received considerable attention in L1 and L2 acquisition. The learners' performance in judging contradiction with similar sentences in the preterite was much more accurate. The advanced learners displayed patterns of response similar to those of native speakers in the three grammatical conditions and in two out of three pragmatic conditions.
