The Effects Of Chinese Aspect Marker Le(了) On Simple Past Marking In English-learner Language

Tense/aspect is the main grammatical device expressing temporality in English. According to Camrie (1976:14), "A system which relates entities to a reference point is termed as a deictic system. Tense is deictic, by contrast, aspect is non-deictic." Tense typically refers to the present moment in the time line, while aspect is the internal temporal constituency of one situation. In a word, tense is situation-external; Aspect is situation-internal. However, tense/aspect is correlated as well. There are three tenses: present, past, and future tense in absolute tense, and two aspects: perfective and imperfective from Comrie (1976). It should be pointed out that English simple past also functions as the universal perfective aspect from the typological perspective.One of the features of tense/aspect is realized on the verbs by verbal morphology or marking (as with English past loved), or partially indicated by grammatical words adjacent to the verb like Chinese particle le and guo. In recent years, linguists contributed a lot to tense/aspect acquisition at home and abroad. However, English simple past still has both higher frequency and higher error rate in English-learner language for Chinese with English as L2. Therefore, the research aims to investigate one interlingual factor le on English simple past marking in English-learner language for Chinese learners. This thesis aims at answering the following questions: 1. What are the effects of Chinese perfective aspect marker le on simple past variation in English-learner language? 2. What are the effects of Chinese perfective aspect marker le on simple past marking in English-learner language?All the data is from 50 English narratives and their Chinese versions by 50 sophomore students of non-English major from Xi'an Institute of Post and Telecommunications in Shaanxi Province. The topic is "one party". Eventually, the author sampled 40 narratives. By the use of quantitative study, the author scrutinized and analyzed the distributions of simple past variation: one group is 71 tokens of simple past variation with le, 7 incorrect sentences with le and 2 sentences with guo; another is 167 tokens without le. Based on the analysis and discussion, the findings...