Chapter One Introduction
1.1Background and Significance of the study
As one of the most important grammatical categories, tense and aspect areusually the center of theoretical linguistic research and applied linguistic research.Besides, as one of the key knowledge of English learning curriculum in middleschool, simple past tense is usually considered difficult for English learners andteachers throughout China while learning and teaching it. During my years’experience as an English learner as well as an English teacher, I noticed that manystudents tended to use verbs or verbal phrases inappropriately to mark an event andsome errors are made, such as incorrectly using some other tenses or aspectsreplacing simple past tense in simple past obligatory contexts. What causes theseincorrect uses of tense-aspect morphemes has drawn the attention and interest of ahost of linguists and a large number of quantitative and qualitative studies have beencarried out. On the basis of detailed analysis, consistent research results have beenachieved that English learners follow a general pattern to mark verbal items from thetense-aspect perspective (Robinson, 1990, 1995; Andersen & Shirai, 1994). It isindicated that in simple past tense obligatory contexts, the verbal items that areprimarily marked by simple past tense tend to be achievements andaccomplishments, whose semantic characteristics are [+dynamic, +telic, +punctual]and [+dynamic, +telic, -punctual] respectively. But what we need to notice is that all the above studies were conducted on language learners who acquire a language asmother tongue or acquire a second language in authentic language environment. Asfor whether the Chinese students learning English as a foreign language still followa similar pattern or not, it was rarely studied and still waits to be testified. Therefore,the present study would be conducted to find out the factors affecting the correct useof simple past tense by focusing on Chinese middle schools students who learnEnglish as a foreign language.
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1.2Research questions
This dissertation, carrying out a corpus-based study, aims at answering thefollowing three research questions.
1) In simple past tense obligatory contexts, what variations would occur inmiddle school English learners’ compositions besides the appropriatesimple past tense marking?
2) In middle school English learners’ compositions, what type of lexicalaspectual verbal items tends to correspond to which type of simple pasttense variations?
3) What causes the occurrence of such a pattern of variations?
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Tense and Aspect
As one basic concept of human language, temporality is usually considered asan indispensible linguistic device to describe an event and thus, is supposed to beacquired prior to other linguistic ability. Most linguists agree that tense and aspectare the two main means to express the concept of temporality. Therefore, in the firstplace, the literature related to tense as well as aspect would be reviewed in this part. Concerning the definition of tense, it has been termed in various ways. Comrie(1985) and Li and Shirai (2000) termed tense as “locates the time of the event underdiscussion with respect to the time at which the speaker utters the sentence”.Specifically, the time when the event under discussion happens is termed as eventtime whereas speech time refers to the time when that event is being discussed.Comrie (1985) considered tense deictic and a temporal axis is employed to illustratehow the interrelationship between event time and speech time is elicited (see Figure2.1). As demonstrated in the Figure 2.1, if the horizontal line represents the temporalaxis, then point A is the present and the left part to the A point refers to the past andthe right to the future. Besides, point A is not only the speech time of the target eventbut also the reference time (Comrie, 1985) of the target event. There are two events——B and C——we take here to discuss as two examples. Seen from the figureabove, event B locates left to A, which means it happened previous to A, that is, ithappened in the past. That is why the –ed inflectional morpheme would be employedto mark the predicate verb. Vice versa, event C must happen in the future because itlocates right to A, which infers that it happens after A. So the future tense describesthe C event. Under these circumstances when the speech time and the reference timeoverlap, it is the absolute tense (Comrie, 1985) we are talking about.
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2.2 Aspect Hypothesis
Although the process of tense-aspect acquisition is rather complex, linguistskeep on carrying out studies on it and proposed many hypotheses to have theemerged acquisition pattern interpreted. Those studies that were carried out on L1learners in the first place were applied to L2 learners as well and similar researchresults were achieved and well summarized by the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen &Shirai, 1994; Robison, 1995). But we must make it explicit that this hypothesis wasnot achieved by only one step but several. It has undergone several important stagesbefore the achievement of the Aspect Hypothesis, including the two distinctions(Bickerton, 1984), the Defective Tense Hypothesis (Weist et al., 1984; Andersen,1989), Primacy of Aspect Hypothesis (Robison, 1990), and finally the AspectHypothesis (Andersen & Shirai, 1994; Robison, 1995). The past decades witnessedthe development of these hypotheses which focus on the relationship between theverbal inflections and inherent properties of verbs.Therefore, the development of the Aspect Hypothesis is to be reviewed in thissection.
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Chapter Three Research Methodology .......23
3.1 Description of the WCEL corpus employed .......23
3.2 Instrument Employed......24
3.3 Data collection ....24
3.3.1 Preparation of Language Data .....25
3.3.2 Data Retrieval ......25
3.3.3 Data Coding of Past Tense Markers and Lexical Aspects .....27
Chapter Four Research Results.......32
4.1 The Simple Past Tense ....32
4.2 The Effect of Lexical Aspects on Simple Past Tense Morpheme.....37
4.3 Summary .......54
Chapter Five Discussion .......56
5.1 Triangle Principle......56
5.2 Lexical aspect and simple past tense ......62
5.3 Lexical aspect and simple present tense .......64
5.4 Lexical aspect and perfect.....66
5.5 Lexical aspect and progressive .........67
5.6 Summary .......68
Chapter Five Discussion
5.1 Triangle Principle
As reviewed in Chapter Two, the Prototype Theory (Rosch, 1973, 1975, 1978;Rosch & Mervis, 1975) was extended from the human categorization to the scope oflanguage acquisition, claiming that language learners are supposed to have theprototypical members of one grammatical category acquired and then followed bythose less prototypical ones (Shirai, 1991 & 1994; Shirai & Andersen, 1995). Basedon this, a brand new way has been obtained to explain how different grammaticalcategories are acquired, such as nouns and verbs (Shen, 1997), transitive structures(Hopper & Thompson, 1980), lexical semantics (Bowerman, 1978; Barrett, 1982 &1986; Greenberg and Kuczaj, 1982), and morphology (Slobin, 1981 & 1985), etc.Sequences concerning the acquisition order of different tense-aspect morphemes werepredicted, such as the order of simple past tense (Taylor, 1989: 149-154; Andersen &Shirai, 1996: 557-558) and that of progressive (Andersen & Shirai, 1996). But whythese sequences are followed still waits to be justified. Therefore, relevance principle(Bybee, 1985; Slobin, 1985: 1157-1256; Andersen, 1993: 328), and congruenceprinciple (Andersen, 1993: 328) were mostly employed to provide explanations forthe predicted sequences.
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Conclusion
Based on the analysis and discussion of the research results in the present studyin the previous chapters, conclusions could be drawn corresponding to the researchquestions proposed in the first chapter.
1) In simple past tense obligatory contexts, there occurred mainly fourtypes of variations of simple past tense inflection in middle schoolEnglish learners’ compositions besides the appropriate simple past tensemarking. These variations appeared as form ones as well as tense-aspectones. The former ones referred to those, in spite of appropriatelyattached to simple past tense, incorrectly marked with respect to formswhile the latter ones covered three types of tense-aspect variations:simple present tense, perfect and progressive. Among them, simplepresent tense took up the largest proportion of the tense-aspectvariations.
2) In middle school English learners’ compositions, the distributions ofdifferent types of lexical aspectual verbal items vary from one to one assimple past tense variations appear in differentiated forms. But overall,it was in agreement with the Aspect Hypothesis, that is, achievementsand accomplishments accounted for the larger part of the total verbalitems correctly marked by the simple past tense irrespective of formright or not. As for tense-aspect variations, simple present tense tendedto be associated to non-punctual verbal items whereas perfect andprogressive very often happened to telic ones and activities respectively,which followed the Aspect Hypothesis as well. And a general pattern oftense-aspect acquisition order might come to a primary conclusion here, that is, simple past tense is supposed to be acquired before simplepresent tense followed by progressive, and perfect the last one.
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Reference (omitted)