Lexical Aspect in the Interlanguage of Taiwan English Learners

• Main Authors: Alan Ping-Yu Huang, 黃平宇
• Other Authors: David Wible
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2004
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/41168274507358292262

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系 === 92 === In the fields of both first language acquisition and second language acquisition (SLA) research, language learners’ acquisition of morphemes has long been a topic of interest. Since the early 1970s, language acquisition researchers began to examine learners’ acquisition of temporal markings and several hypotheses have been put forth to describe the patterns of language learners’ acquisition of tense-aspect morphology. One of these hypotheses, the Aspect Hypothesis, is perhaps the most important one and has been confirmed by numerous studies (e.g. Antinucci and Miller, 1976; Bardovi-Harlig and Reynolds, 1995; Bloom, Lifter, and Hafitz, 1980; Robison, 1995; Shirai and Anderson, 1995). According to the central claim of the Aspect Hypothesis, language learners would be influenced by the lexical aspectual classes of verbs or predicates when these learners use the temporal markings in their target language. For instance, while acquiring a language, in the beginning stages, a learner would tend to use past and perfective markings with verbs or predicates that semantically entail clear inherent endpoints (e.g. die and draw a picture) while adding progressive affixes to verbs which are semantically dynamic and durative (e.g. play and swim). However, though the Aspect Hypothesis has been confirmed by numerous previous studies, it is not without problems. For the hypothesis to be considered to be plausible, first, a premise needs to be accepted that language learners have acquired the lexical aspect of the verbs they learn. If it is shown that language learners do not necessarily grasp the verbal aspect of verbs in their target languages, the premise would be undermined and the Aspect Hypothesis would be no longer tenable since it is paradoxical that language learners are, on the one hand, influenced by lexical aspect when they use temporal markings with verbs and, on the other hand, possibly have not acquired the lexical aspect of these verbs. The present research serves as the first study to point out the paradox implied in the central claim of the Aspect Hypothesis, and three relevant studies were thus conducted and are reported in the thesis. First, a corpus study was conducted with the data coming from an L2 learner corpus (English TLC) showing, in Taiwan English L2 learners’ writings, there was indeed a strong correlation between these learners’ use of temporal markings and English L2 verbal aspect, thus confirming the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis. Then, a study including several elicitation tests used to investigate Taiwan learners’ awareness of English L2 lexical aspect displayed L2 learners actually had difficulties in being sensitive to the lexical aspect of verbs in a second language. The results of the two studies confirmed the existence of a paradox implied in the central claim of the Aspect Hypothesis. To further provide a plausible account for the paradox, the third study was carried out and showed, in fact, L2 learners’ use of temporal markings correlated with the distribution of tense-aspect markers across aspectual classes in the input provided in their textbooks. This suggests that a highly plausible alternative account that avoids the paradox of the Aspect Hypothesis is the input addressed to learners. Based on the findings of these studies, the limitations of the present research and some suggestions for future work are also reported in the thesis.