| This study describes and analyzes variable past tense marking in the spoken English of Vietnamese refugees now residing in the United States. The research is based on a sociolinguistic approach to the study of language variation. The analysis focuses on the influence of linguistic, social, psychological, and historical factors on tense marking, and statistical analysis is used to assist in the interpretation of the quantitative data.; The data were collected in the Vietnamese refugee community in Northern Virginia--located in the greater Washington, D.C. area. Tape-recorded interviews conducted with 32 subjects were analyzed. The subjects were evenly distributed among four age levels (10-12, 15-18, 20-26, and 33-55), two groups based on length of residency in the United States (1-3 and 4-7 years), and both sexes.; Several linguistic and social variables are shown to constrain tense marking: verb form (irregular verbs favor tense marking); type of regular verb (those with final consonant clusters have a lower incidence of marking than those with final /d/ singleton or final /Id/); type of irregular verb (those with final replacives have a lower incidence of marking than the other three phonetic forms); following phonological environment of the verb (following consonants favor unmarked tense), age level, and length of residency (the younger subjects in the 4-7 length of residency group had the highest relative incidence of tense marking). Frequency of use of some verbs and individual lexical items influence incidence of tense marking. There is also an interaction effect of some variables. Other factors, such as motivation, are discussed.; Three approaches to discourse analysis are used in the examination of tense marking in two narratives extracted from the corpus. It is demonstrated that while higher-level factors may influence tense marking in narratives, an analysis based on these factors may be invalid if surface-level features are not also examined.; The relevance of the study for sociolinguistic variation research, studies of interlanguage data, and the construction and testing of models of second language acquisition is discussed. |
