The Acquisition Of English Progressive Aspect By Chinese-Speaking L2 Learners: Towards An Ot Account

This dissertation sets out to investigate, within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT, Prince & Smolensky, 1993, 2004), the problem of how Chinese-speaking learners of L2-English acquire the English progressive aspect, which poses a typical learning problem of mapping conflicting semantic, morphosyntactic and discourse constraints on an aspectual form. The overarching goal of this study is to provide a unified account of the development of L2 tense-aspect system in general, and the English progressive aspect in particular, by analyzing how these constraints interact and what impact their interactions have on L2 acquisition of tense-aspect morphology.Three OT-compatible constraints are identified, i.e., NoCoer, Ident(TF) and MarkT, which pertain respectively to the semantic, discourse and morphosyntactic constraints on tense-aspect marking. These three constraints are ranked as Ident(TF) >>MarkT>>NoCoer, with the discourse requirement for the temporal forms at the top of the scale in English norm. However, the tense-aspect system of L2 interlanguage, according to [M>>F] initial ranking hypothesis in OT, is assumed to be dominated by temporal features inherent in the verbal predicate when L2 learners make aspectual choices. It is further assumed that, with the growth of L2 proficiency, this semantic constraint is gradually demoted, triggered by L2 learners' recognition of the dominant role played by discourse grounding function of the aspectual morphology.To assess the plausibility of these assumptions generated within OT framework, five specific hypotheses were investigated through three experimental tasks, i.e., an Acceptability Judgement Task (AJT), a Movie Clip Retell Task (MCRT) and an Aspect Sentence Interpretation Task (ASIT). Ninety Chinese EFL learners who...