| Tense acquisition has always been a hot topic in the field of second language acquisition.In the past 30 years,researchers at home and abroad have done a lot of research on tense acquisition from all angles,and discussed the effects of linguistic factors on English tense acquisition.Second language acquisition of temporal systems has become one of the main difficulties for learners.In order to explore the rules of temporal variation,this study uses the Variable Rule Analysis to explore the simple past tense marking by using the written samples of 60 non-English majors,and analyzes the factors that might affect the variation of simple past tense marking.This study aims to explore the following three problems:(1)What is the distribution of the simple past variation?(2)What are the factors that can significantly affect the variation of simple past tense marking in written English?(3)What are the unique features of simple past tense marking in written samples? The results showed that,firstly,for the variation of simple past marking,the learners had a good master of the simple past tense,but the distribution of its variation forms showed that the learners used the simple past tense with the highest frequency,possibly due to the great difference between English and Chinese tense systems and the learners acquired the present tense form first.Secondly,verb salience,lexical aspect,temporal adverbials and word frequency all had significant effects on the variation of the simple past tense marking,among which the word frequency factor was most significant.Finally,there were some unique features of simple past tense marking in written samples as opposed to that in oral samples.The results have both theoretical and pedagogical implications.The findings of this study have pointed to more possible contributing factors,thus throwing light on future research.And it also revealed some problems of Chinese students in the process of English tense acquisition. |
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