The Acquisition Of Progressive Aspect Marker Zai And Perfective Aspect Marker Le In Child Mandarin Chinese

Tense and aspect are two of the most important grammatical systems of verbs for expressing temporal concepts in the world. The acquisition of tense-aspect marking has been extensively investigated, one generalization has emerged:the strong effect of verb semantics (i.e., lexical aspect) on the acquisition of grammatical marking of tense and aspect, a phenomenon that has entered into the literature as the Aspect Hypothesis. Aspect Hypothesis is generally supported in language acquisition, but it still caused considerable controversy. The explanations for the Aspect Hypothesis were also debated widely.This study aims at investigating the early emergence and subsequent development of the perfective aspect marker le and the progressive aspect marker zai in Mandarin-speaking children, for they represent two basic perspectives:perfective (le) and imperfective (zai). The present study mainly explores the acquisition of zai and le by three groups of children from the following aspects:First, to investigate the order of acquisition of the two aspect markers: the perfective aspect marker le and the progressive aspect marker zai in child Mandarin Chinese. Second, to investigate whether children's comprehension ability of zai and le increase with age. Third, to explore the differences in the comprehension of le and zai with the two kinds of verbs:active and accomplishment verbs. At last, to verify whether the acquisition of le and zai is in accordance with the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis and try to explain the Aspect Hypothesis.Both comprehension experiment and imitation experiment were adopted to examine the comprehension of le and zai, especially with Vendle's four-way classification of verbs, namely, active verbs, stative verbs, accomplishment verbs and achievement verbs. In order to enable children to comprehend the sentence structure, pictures and directions were used in each experiment. Sixty subjects from a public kindergarten in Changsha participated in the two tasks, who ranged in age from 3; 00 to 5; 11 (years; months). They were divided into three groups:20 children at the age of 3,20 children at the age of 4 and 20 children at the age of 5. All the subjects, who were monolingual Mandarin-speaking, lived a normal life and showed no impairment on speech, intelligence.The results from the comprehension experiment data showed that each group of subjects comprehended perfective aspect marker le better than progressive aspect marker zai. Three groups of children comprehended the combination of zai with active verbs better than the combination of zai with achievement verbs. In terms of performance of the perfective aspect marker le, it showed that the three groups of children comprehend the combination of le with achievement verbs better than the combination of le with active verbs.The findings from the imitation experiment revealed that that the ungrammatical combination of zai with achievement verbs presented a particular imitation difficulty, especially for the younger children. While the ungrammatical combination of zai with stative verbs did not indicate a particular difficulty to children, the 3-year-olds imitated the ungrammatical stative combinations just as well as the grammatical ones, and the 4-and 5-year-olds imitated them even better than the grammatical ones.These results were consistent with the predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis generally: children first use perfective marking on accomplishment verbs, eventually extending its use to activity verbs; In languages that encode the perfective/imperfective distinction, imperfective past develops later than perfective past; In languages that have progressive aspect, children first use progressive aspect marking mostly with activity verbs, then extend to accomplishment verbs. But the results of the imitation experiment were deviate from the Aspect Hypothesis, for Children do incorrectly overextend progressive aspect marking to the stative verbs.We hold that a weaker version of the Aspect Hypothesis may better illuminate the acquisition of grammatical aspect and lexical aspect cross-linguistically. For the explanation of the Aspect Hypothesis, Slobin's (1985) Basic Child Grammar was discussed deeply on the basis of the on the results in the paper. In addition, we suggest new ways of looking at the results in the light of recent probabilistic hypotheses that emphasize the role of input as well as prototypes.