This book explores the association of form and meaning in the acquisition of tense and aspect by adult learners of nine target languages. The book provides a survey and synthesis of studies from five perspectives: meaning-oriented approaches, acquisitional sequences, the aspect hypothesis, the discourse hypothesis, and the effect of instruction

Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig is Professor and Chair of Second Language Studies at Indiana University. Her primary research interests are second-language temporality and tense-mood-aspect systems and interlanguage pragmatics. She has served as President of the American Association of Applied Linguistics (2008) and former editor of Language Learning (2002-2005). Major publications include Themes in SLA Research (John Benjamins, 2006) and Interlanguage Pragmatics: Exploring Institutional Talk (Erlbaum, 2005).