A growing number of studies have examined the expression of motion events in the spatial domain. However, few have focused on how this domain interacts with the expression of temporality, including during second language acquisition. The thesis aims to address two main questions: how space and time are interrelated in discourse; whether language-specific properties have an impact on the acquisition of a second language. Particular attention is placed on the implications of typological factors in English and French (as satellite- vs. verb-framed languages) in the spatial domain. In addition, the thesis tests several hypotheses concerning the emergence of verbal morphology for the expression of temporal-aspectual distinctions in L2 acquisition. The analyses examine the acquisition of French by English adult learners by means of two narrative tasks that served to elicit verbalizations about caused and voluntary motion events. As expected, English natives speakers show the lexicalization pattern that is characteristic of satellite-framed languages: they encode manner and cause in the verb, and path in the network of the verb, where utterances are often bounded, particularly by means of spatial particles. By contrast, French native speakers show large variations in how they distribute these three main components of caused motion events as a result of the boundary constraint that is typical of verbs in verb-framed languages. As native English speakers, the learners express cause and manner in the verb and encounter difficulties with path, which they attempt to express at first by localisations. At the first level of proficiency, they bound their utterances by means of verbal morphology. With the development of their L2, they only gradually integrate the lexicalization pattern of the target language. Finally, discourse context plays an important role in how learners and native speakers use verbal morphology. It also shows how learners partially integrate the spatial and temporal-aspectual markings of the L2 to express motion in discourse.
