The Acquisition of English Progressive Aspect Marker by Chinese Learners

doi:10.3969/j.issn.1674-8921.2017.03.012

Abstract

Abstract: The acquisition of tense and aspect has always been the research focus in the field of SLA. This paper studies the acquisition of English progressive aspect marker -ing by Chinese learners. Its main focus is on the effect of lexical aspect on the acquisition of English progressive marker. The aspect hypothesis and the prototype hypothesis are tested through examining the production data from CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus) and comprehension data from a grammaticality judgment test. The corpora ST5 (freshman English majors) and ST6 (senior English majors) of CLEC were chosen as the production data. In the grammaticality judgment test, the participants are the students from Hunan University, including 30 freshmen English majors and 30 senior English majors. SPSS 19.0 is employed to analyze the results. We have the following findings:(1)The production of English progressive marker is strongly connected with lexical aspects. For both freshmen and seniors as English majors, the frequency of four lexical aspect types in the corpora is in an obvious hierarchy, activities> accomplishments > achievements > statives. The results are in support of the aspect hypothesis.(2) After analyzing the GJT results, it is found that lexical aspect also affects the comprehension of English progressive marker among Chinese learners, for both groups accept the progressive meanings with a significant hierarchy of lexical aspects, activities> achievements > statives. The comprehension results also agree with the aspect hypothesis. Certain adverbials also affect comprehension of progressive marking. The results of the senior group totally consist with the prediction of the prototype account, with the acceptance in a sequence of process (activity) > habitual / futurate > stative progressive. But the freshmen group shows an acceptance sequence of process (activity) > futurate > habitual/ stative progressive, which does not consist with the prototype hypothesis. (3) The two proficiency levels (freshman and senior English majors) only have a little influence on the acquisition of progressive marking in English.

CLC Number:

H319.3

CHEN Xiaoxiang, JIANG Qiao, ZENG Xiaoyan. The Acquisition of English Progressive Aspect Marker by Chinese Learners[J]. Contemporary Foreign Languages Studies, 2017, 17(03): 65-73.

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