Passato remoto, passato prossimo e imperfetto: uso biografico e fittizio delle forme al passato nelle interlingue di immigrati di area partenopea

The study focuses on the expression of temporal past relations with respect to biographic and fictional narratives by several groups of learners living in Naples and the surrounding area. All of them are immigrants and have different L1 languages (Ukrainian, Polish, Arabic, Igbo, Wolof, Twi, Romanian). Some acquired Italian in a completely spontaneous way; some others both in a natural and institutional manner. The region of Naples is a particularly interesting area for past temporal relations, since, different from Northern regions, three forms of past forms are still very active: the Passato Remoto, the Passato Prossimo and the Imperfetto, the first two for perfective processes, the third one for the (essentially) imperfective ones. In the last twenty years, temporality has been widely studied with respect to Italian L2, but the data analysed has been concerned with data of learners living in the North of the country, an area where the Passato Remoto has completely disappeared. So our work focus on a crucial topic of acquisitional linguistics while also allowing the evaluation of some new components concerning the different input learners are exposed to and the different L1 languages of the informants. Learners groups’ results were always compared to reference Italian L1 groups, for all the tasks proposed. The fictional narratives, in particular, were elicited by two stimula: the picture story Frog, where are you ?,by Meyer 1969, and an episode of the Polish cartoon series Reksio, by Marzalek 1967. Our analysis will demonstrate that the past forms our immigrant learners use are not different from natives’ but that their employment can diverge with respect to the discourse principles that these forms detain in Italian L1 speakers’ narrations, with evident consequences for the consecutio temporum and the holistic organization of the text. Furthermore, all the groups: exploit, although with different percentages, the Passato Remoto morphemes, dropping, at least partly, the “auxiliary + Past Participle” analytical strategy (a); they still have problems with imperfectiveness and the use of past in subordinate clauses.