The Effects Of Multiple Linguistic Factors On The Simple Past Use In English Interlanguage

One of the characteristics of tense/aspect use in English interlanguage is that the ways verbs are inflected in obligatory contexts are highly variable. It is a controversial issue whether such variable patterns are systematic or free. This dissertation aims to investigate the effects of several linguistic factors on the simple past use in English interlanguage of Chinese-speaking learners. In a corpus-based preliminary study, simple past was identified as the topic of the main study, as it had both higher frequency and higher error rate. The linguistic factors involved in the main study comprise five intralingual factors (verb salience, lexical aspect, temporal adverbials, clause types and narrative structure) and one interlingual factor (the aspect marker le). These factors have been respectively found to affect tense/aspect development in various univariate studies, but this dissertation is the first study that incorporates all these factors in one project and explores their individual effects and interactive effects on the simple past use based on the English data from college students in China. The theoretical framework adopted in this dissertation is called interlanguage variation model. It has been proposed by the present author for variation studies in SLA to avoid the limitations of other models.This dissertation addresses six research questions: (1) Is the simple past variation systematic with regard to some of those intralingual factors? (2) What individual effects do those intralingual factors exert on the simple past use? (3) What interactive effects do those intralingual factors exert on the simple past use? (4) Is the simple past variation systematic with regard to the aspect marker le? (5) What effects does the aspect marker le exert on the simple past use? (6) Does the aspect marker le interact with the intralingual factors?The interlanguage data analyzed consisted of 120 English narrative compositions together with their Chinese versions produced by native Chinese speakers learning English (high-intermediate level) with a formal instructional background in P. R. China. As for the dependent variable, all kinds of tense/aspect forms in the obligatorycontexts for simple past were coded so that the proportions of the appropriate simple past use and the simple past marking (all simple past forms including targetlike and non-targetlike forms) were computed. As for the independent variables, the six linguistic factors were coded following reliable classifications. The statistical methods such as Chi-square test, Crosstabs, T-test, ANOVA, loglinear analysis, Z-test were utilized during data processing and results presentation, so were bar graphs and pie graphs.Corresponding to the research questions, this study has obtained the following findings:(1) The simple past variation was found to be systematic with regard to such factors as verb salience, lexical aspect, temporal adverbials and narrative structure, but free with clause types. Further analyses of the interactions among the four significant intralingual factors discovered that the simple past variation is systematic for some interactions but not for others. Specifically, it is systematic regarding the interaction between narrative structure and verb salience and that between lexical aspect and narrative structure, but unsystematic in terms of the interaction between verb salience and lexical aspect and that among verb salience, lexical aspect and narrative structure.(2) Except for clause types, all the other four intralingual factors have significant effects on the simple past use (p<.05). First, regular verbs are significantly favored more than irregular verbs in being used in simple past (p<.05). The saliency hypothesis holds true within either regular verbs or irregular verbs, namely, the more salient verbs are, the more likely they are marked in simple past. This hypothesis may be accounted for by the theory of figure and ground. Second, lexical aspectual classes differ significantly in the simple past use (p<.05),...