The L2 Acquisition of the Chinese Aspect Marking

PACLIC 28 !299 1 The L2 Acquisition of the Chinese Aspect Marking1 Suying Yang Department of English Language and Literature Hong Kong Baptist University syang@hkbu.edu.hk 1 The research reported here is supported by a grant (RGC/97-98/68) from the Hong Kong University Research Grant Committee. Abstract By analyzing corpus data, we have shown that the tendencies of restricting perfective past marking to Accomplishments and Achievements and imperfective marking to Statives and Activities as described by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai, 1991; Andersen & Shirai, 1996), undesirable in the acquisition of various languages, are desirable in the acquisition of a language like Chinese, because these tendencies coincide with the natural occurrence patterns of –le and –zhe. We argue that different languages may observe the same natural language principle (Bybee’s Relevance Principle) in different ways, rendering the learner tendencies desirable or undesirable in the acquisition processes. Based on our new observations, we propose some modifications to the Aspect Hypothesis. 1 Introduction In the early nineteen seventies, researchers carried out a number of studies on first language (L1) acquisition of the tense-aspect system, and their findings show a close relationship between the use of the verbal morphology and aspectual properties of verbs/situations like [� dynamic], [� telic] and [� punctual] (Antinucci & Miller, 1976; Bloom et al., 1980; Bronckart & Sinclair, 1973; Li, 1989). Beginning L1 learners tend to restrict their use of the perfective past (simple past tense in English which indicates both past time location and perfective aspect (Smith, 1997) to telic verbs (Achievements and Accomplishments), and their use of the imperfective aspect to Activities. The same patterns have also been attested in second language (L2) acquisition (Andersen,1986, 1989, 1990; Bardovi-Harlig, 1992, 1994; Bardovi-Harlig & Bergström, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig & Reynolds, 1995; Flashner, 1989; Kaplan, 1987; Kumpf,1984; Robison, 1990; Shirai & Andersen, 1995; etc.) There widely attested developmental patterns were first referred to as the Defective Tense Hypothesis (Weist et al., 1984), and later came to be known as the Primacy of Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen, 1989; Robison 1990) or the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen & Shrai, 1994; Robison, 1995, Shrai & Kurono, 1998). The Defective Tense Hypothesis attributes the observed patterns “to a cognitive inability of a young child to conceive of a notion of ‘past event or situation’” (Andersen & Shirai, 1996, p. 560), while the Aspect Hypothesis suggests that learners primarily use verbal morphology to mark lexical aspectual distinction rather than temporal distinction. The Aspect Hypothesis as summarized in its simplest form by Andersen (2002: 79) makes the following three claims): 1) [Learners] first use past marking (e.g., English) or perfective marking (Chinese, Spanish, etc.) to achievement and accomplishment verbs, eventually extending its use to activity and [then to] stative verbs. (…) 2) In languages that encode the perfective- imperfective distinction, [a morphologically encoded] imperfective past [as in the Romance languages] appears later than perfective past, and imperfective past marking begins with Copyright 2014 by Suying Yang 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation pages 299–308 PACLIC 28 !300 2 stative …

Content truncated to 500 words