Pedagogical potential of Cognitive Grammar descriptions for the pluperfect in Spanish

Abstract Second/foreign language grammar studies usually focus on the validation of grammatical conceptualizations with learners, sometimes overlooking the paramount need to test these conceptualizations against users’ judgements and corpus searches as a way of verifying the relevance, frequency and suitability of the items, examples or explanations before the experimental phases. This paper deals with three pre-experimental validation criteria employed to measure the pedagogical potential of Cognitive Grammar descriptions for the Spanish pluperfect: (1) learner corpus searches based on caes – Corpus de Aprendices de Español –, (2) native-speaker corpus searches by means of EsTenTen-18-subcorpus from Sketch Engine, and (3) language users’ judgements. This tense rarely receives enough attention in learning materials due to its apparent simplicity in terms of both morphology and functional import. However, learner corpus searches show certain instability in its use. This paper explores the steps taken within the research project imagine in relation to this tense, including grammatical descriptions developed within the Cognitive Grammar framework and from a temporal-epistemic perspective in an attempt to account for the variety of uses of this tense.