The acquisition of temporal marking: A bidirectional study

This dissertation discusses the acquisition of aspect in English as well as Chinese. It is advocated in this dissertation that the acquisition of aspect marking can be more effectively approached by using a prototype theory. The establishment of prototypes finds its justification in the congruence between tense and lexical aspect on the one hand and lexical aspect and grammatical aspect on the other. In terms of L2 acquisition of English tense-aspect morphology, two prototypes are established: (1) present tense-atelic verb-imperfective; (2) past tense-telic verb-perfective. The two prototypes lead to four verifiable working hypotheses. Examination of a million-word Chinese Learners English Corpus corroborates three of the four hypotheses with exception of telic verbs in past temporal domain at the Elementary Level. Examination of the data reveals that the deviation of telic verbs finds its explanation in discourse and that Chinese learner of English resorts to pragmatic device instead of morphological means to mark temporality. The establishment of prototypes in association with aspect marking in Chinese involves only the lexical and grammatical aspects because Chinese lacks tense morphology. Two working hypotheses have been formulated on the basis of the prototypical interaction between lexical aspect and grammatical aspect: (1) The perfective aspect marker le is acquired earlier than guo; (2) The acquisition of the imperfective aspect zai occurs later than that of zhe. Analysis of the data from 33 English learners of Chinese as a foreign language from three different levels, however, shows that neither of the two hypotheses is corroborated. A deeper look into the data demonstrates that discourse again plays a central role in determining the acquisition course of aspect markers. In conclusion, both studies have suggested that aspect marking is not only conditioned by lexical aspect but it is also shaped in discourse. The dissertation concludes with the discussion of the pedagogical implication with relation to the findings in the two studies.