Acquisition of additional languages as emerging multilingual constructicons. A Construction Grammar approach to progressive aspectuality.

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, on the one hand, a semantic-cognitive notion of progressive aspectuality, which is transportable across languages and can be packaged differently in the linguistic material, both grammatically or lexically (Dessì-Schmid 2019), and, on the other, 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 express the concept of progressive aspectuality in language contact situations. The analysis draws on Diasystematic Construction Grammar (DCxG) (Höder 2012, 2014, 2021) which proposes that speakers develop both shared cross-linguistic constructions (“form-meaning-function constellations”, Goldberg 2003) which are viewed as similar across multiple languages (termed “diaconstructions”), and language-specific constructions (termed “idioconstructions”). These form a “multilingual constructicon”, i.e. a network of shared constructions which not only formally describe linguistic expressions, but also represents mental categories that speakers create and acquire through exposure (Hilpert 2021). In this study, the main aim is to explain how the notion of progressive aspectuality emerges in multilingual speakers when learning an additional language (i.e. English) through reorganizational processes motivated not only by the identification of formal/functional similarities across the languages of their repertoires, but also as a result of their communicative practices which are not predictable from abstract representations (Höder 2012: 245). Speakers’ multilingual constructicons for progressive aspectuality are modeled considering the three languages involved in this study, i.e. Italian, English and German, as part of the same emerging constructicon which can be reconstructed from empirical data. Specifically, the study relies on English learner corpus data (Leonide corpus, Glaznieks et al. 2022) generated by lower-secondary school students writing two different text types (opinion texts and picture stories). The data have been collected in South Tyrol (Italy), a multilingual region where German and Italian are official languages, and English is taught as a school subject. Corpus data have been analysed onomasiologically, starting from the semantics of students’ productions and identifying different usage types of progressive constructions. While previous studies in Cognitive Grammar and Construction Grammar (De Wit & Brisard 2014; Michaelis 2004) have examined the various linguistic realisations of progressive aspectuality and highlighted its polysemy, showing that it conveys additional meanings beyond the purely aspectual, these studies have primarily focused on native language varieties and have not considered whether learners of English can convey similar linguistic variation and meanings. In line with De Wit & Brisard’s account of the semantics of the English progressive (2014), students also rely on progressive constructions conveying the core meaning of ongoingness, emphasizing an action or state as in progress at a particular point in time. However, additional meaning subtypes emerge in lower-frequency productions, where aspecto-temporal meanings extend to emotional connotations. The role of adverbials is crucial in expressing different meaning types when they co-occur with other elements, thus supporting the idea that aspectuality is a multi-level content category realized across different linguistic elements. Regarding the linguistic realization of progressive aspectuality, the findings reveal that learners employ different constructions, ranging from a) morphologically aspectual-marked constructions expressed by verbal periphrases having a high degree of grammaticalization, such as the English [to be + Ving] verbal periphrasis; b) constructions formally realized as verbal periphrases, but with a lower degree of grammaticalization, such as [continue + Ving]; c) other constructions in which progressive aspectuality is expressed mainly by lexical means. The findings support the idea that progressive aspectuality should be understood as a semantic notion in its whole semantic-functional space, which extends across different types of constructions, and that these are usually modeled on the basis of typological differences between the languages. As a final remark, and in keeping with DCxG’s aim of modelling multilingual linguistic knowledge in a socio‑cognitively grounded and realistic manner (Höder et al. 2021: 314), the study also reflects on the conceptualization of learners’ language backgrounds as prototypical dominant language constellations (DLCs) (Aronin 2006, 2016) embedded in the unique sociolinguistic ecology of South Tyrol, i.e. a multilingual region where several languages coexist and where language use is closely intertwined with particular institutional practices. References Aronin, L. (2006). Dominant language constellations: An approach to multilingualism studies. In M. Ó. Laoire (Ed.), Multilingualism in educational settings, Schneider Publications, 140–159. Aronin, L. (2016). Multicompetence and dominant language constellation. In Vivian Cook & Li Wei (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of linguistic multicompetence, Cambridge University Press, 142–163. De Wit, A. & Brisard, F. (2014). 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