Abstract
We investigated allowance of five common lexical bases used to form Spanish progressive constructions: estar, andar, ir, venir, and seguir. In a written contextualized acceptability task, five identical sentences appeared after a given context, the only difference being the lexical base used. Participants evaluated each sentence as possible or not possible. There were 80 sentences (4 verbal aspectual categories × 4 adverbial types × 5 lexical bases), producing a corpus of 7,600 responses. We compared learners from four different proficiency levels (n = 75), and a first-language Spanish (n = 20) baseline. Results indicate that estar was the most accepted lexical base, and learners allowed all five lexical bases from the lowest Spanish proficiency level. Relevant pedagogical implications are discussed.