Mouton de Gruyter 1-iral-51-1 — 2013/2/1 11:49—55— #58—ce Developing actional competence and the building blocks of telicity in L2 Italian 1 STEFANO RASTELLI AND MIRTA VERNICE IRAL 51 (2013), 55–75 0019042X/2013/051-055 DOI 10.1515/iral-2013-0003 c Walter de Gruyter Abstract The Aspect Hypothesis assumes that - in early interlanguages - the perfec- tive past spreads from telic to atelic verbs because events occuring in the past are easier to be associated with predicates having an inherent endpoint in their lexico-conceptual representation. In this study it is questioned whether for initial L2ers knowing the general meaning of a verb entails knowing also its actional template and that learners have innate principles that drive them to distinguish telic and atelic verbs from scratch. Data from our experiment of prompted narrative suggest that L1 English, L2 Italian tutored learners – although having knowledge of some telic verbs of motion – prefer to use the underspecified andare ‘go’ and to build telicity compositionally. The overuse of most frequent and “basic verbs” and the promotion of adjuncts to the rank of real arguments is a challenge for both the Aspect Hypothesis and the para- metric view to the acquisition of the tense-aspect system in a second language. 1. The topic of research 1.1. Rationale of the study This study is about verb actionality in learner language and namely the expres- sion of telicity in L2 Italian. We use the term ‘actionality’ to refer to what is also known as lexical aspect, inherent aspect, semantic aspect, inner aspect, situation aspect or Aktionsart. Actionality is contrasted with ‘aspect’, which is also referred to as grammatical aspect, outer aspect or viewpoint aspect (see Andersen 1998; Andersen 1991; Salaberry and Shirai 2002). By ‘actional con- tent’ of a predicate we mean the lexical aspect features matrix of that predicate, 1. Sections 1, 2, 3, 5, and 6 were written by Stefano Rastelli. Section 4 was written by Mirta Vernice. We want to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.