The Effects Of Lexical Aspect And Narrative Structure On The Present Perfect Use-Based On Corpus

It is known to all that the process of tense/aspect acquisition is complicated. Researchers have made a lot of studies to explore the factors influencing the acquisition of tense and aspect. They found that tense/aspect variation in second language acquisition is constrained by many factors, among which linguistic factors are very significant. There are five intralingual factors in all, that is, verb salience, lexical aspect, temporal adverbials, clause type and narrative structure. And the impacts of lexical aspect and narrative structure are relatively great.This dissertation aims to investigate the effects of lexical aspect and narrative structure on the present perfect use in English interlanguage of Chinese-speaking learners by using the Chinese Learners English Corpus.This dissertation addresses three research questions: (1) How is the distribution of other tense forms instead of the present perfect form in obligatory contexts across lexical aspectual class and narrative structure? (2) What individual effects do these two linguistic factors exert on the present perfect use? (3) What interactive effects do these two linguistic factors exert on the present perfect use?The data exploited in the present study come from the high school student subcorpus of CLEC (Chinese Learner English Corpus). Because the present study involves the narratives, the author first made selection about the written compositions in this subcorpus; then through lots of analyses and judgments, those narratives selected were put together as a small corpus, including 924 compositions, totaling 134,240 words. Each verb in the obligatory context was annotated and each sentence there was annotated. Such statistical methods as Chi-square test, Crosstabs, One-way ANOVA, Z- test were adopted in data processing and results presentation.The results indicate that learners' use of present perfect is good on the whole, and it is easy for learners to be confused by the simple present and present perfect tense from those variants. For the narrative structure, the proportion of variants in the foreground clause is higher than that in the background clause on the whole. And both the classification of the verbs by lexical aspect and the narrative structure have significant effects on the present perfect variation, which supports the Aspect Hypothesis partially and the Discourse Hypothesis totally, but the interaction of these two factors on present perfect use is not quite obvious. However, lexical aspect exerts greater effect on the present perfect use in background than that in foreground, and it shows that lexical aspect has a little stronger effect than narrative structure on the present perfect use.This study has both important theoretical implications and pedagogical implications for English teaching and foreign language learning.