ABSTRACT The study addresses the research gap of how being a speaker of a Slavic language influences the ability to convey tempo-aspectual meanings in Romance languages by examining personal and impersonal narratives delivered in written and spoken mode by learners of L3 Spanish and L3 Italian with L1 Slovak and L2 English. Narratives are analysed following the methods of interlanguage analysis proposed by Ellis and Barkhuizen [(2005). Analysing learner language. Oxford University Press] and Salaberry and Comajoan [(2013). Research design and methodology in studies on L2 tense and aspect. De Gruyter Mouton], such as coding for grounding, frequency analysis of tense forms and lexical aspectual classes, etc. Following the ideas presented by Bayley (2013, Data analysis: Quantitative approaches. In M. R. Salaberry & L. Comajoan (Eds.), Research design andmethodology in studies on L2 tense and aspect (pp. 357–390). De Gruyter Mouton), binomial logistic regression models were built which showed that (a) the combination of discourse grounding and lexical aspect is of predictive power regarding the appropriateness of participants’ choices of morphological marking; (b) the distributional characteristics of morphological marking on telic predicates differs from activities and statives. One of the main differences compared to the results of previous studies, conducted on speakers of Germanic languages, is that the data did not provide enough evidence for morphological marking being used to convey primarily temporal distinctions (see Salaberry, 1999, The development of past tense verbal morphology in classroom L2 Spanish. Applied Linguistics, 20(2), 151–178. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/20.2.151; Wiberg, E. (1996). Reference to past events in bilingual Italian-Swedish children of school age. Linguistics, 34(5), 1087–1114. https://doi.org/10.1515/ling.1996.34.5.1087]) and presented the marking of telic predicates in foreground with perfective morphology as consistent, disregarding the level of participants’ performance.

... used in the specific mode and merely mark the situation as belonging to speech or narrative.47 If tense forms of the ... Romance languages , has also been tested in Arabic ( Souissi 1982 ) , German ( Souissi 1982 ) , Ancient Greek ... This monograph on biblical linguistics is a highly specialized, pragmatic investigation of the controversial question of "foregrounding"-the deviation from some norm or convention-in Old Testament narratives. The author presents and examines the two main sources of pragmatic foregrounding: events or states deviating from well-established schemata, structures of reader expectation that can be manipulated by the narrator to highlight specific "chunks" of discourse; and evaluative devices, which are used by the narrator to indicate to the reader the point of the story and direct its interpretation. Cotrozzi critiques the particular evaluative device known as the "historic present", a narrative strategy that employs the present tense to describe past event. He tests two main theories that supp

prt) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past. In some languages, such as Spanish, French The preterite or preterit ( PRET-ər-it; abbreviated pret or prt) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past. In some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense. In general, it combines the perfective aspect (event viewed as a single whole; it is not to be confused with the similarly name The preterite or preterit ( PRET-ər-it; abbreviated pret or prt) is a grammatical tense or verb form serving to denote events that took place or were completed in the past. In some languages, such as Spanish, French, and English, it is equivalent to the simple past tense. In general, it combines the perfective aspect (event viewed as a single whole; it is not to be confused with the similarly named perfect) with the past tense and may thus also be termed the perfective past. In grammars of particular languages the preterite is sometimes called the past historic, or (particularly in the Greek grammatical tradition) the aorist. When the term preterite is used in relation to specific languages, it may not correspond precisely to this definition. In English it can be used to refer to the simple past verb form, which sometimes (but not always) expresses perfective aspect. The case of German is similar: the Präteritum is the simple (non-compound) past tense, which does not always imply perfective aspect, and is anyway often replaced by the Perfekt (compound past) even in perfective past meanings. Preterite may be denoted by the glossing abbreviation pret or prt. The word derives from the Latin praeteritum (the perfective participle of praetereo), meaning 'passed by' or 'past'. In Romanian, the preterite is known as perfectul simplu (literally, the simple past or simple perfect). The preterite indicates a past accomplished action (translated: "verbed"); however, this tense is not frequent in the official language and not frequent in the standard speech (not used in Republic of Moldova and not used in the Romanian regions of Transylvania, Muntenia and Moldova). The general tendency is to use the compound past (perfectul compus) to express a past action that is perceived as completed at the moment of speaking. Simple past is still actively used in current speech in the southwestern part of Romania, especially in Oltenia, but also in Banat, Crișana and Maramureș, mostly in rural areas. Usage of the preterite is very frequent in written narrative discourse, the simple past of the speech verbs being generally after a dialogue line in narration: