Testing The Aspect Hypothesis

The acquisition of tense and aspect is an important component of second language acquisition. Researchers have directly tied the inherent lexical value of the verb and predicate to the development of tense and aspect morphology and proposed the Aspect Hypothesis.This thesis examines the Aspect Hypothesis which asserts that verb inflections in early interlanguage systems function primarily as markers of lexical aspect independent of the target language. Lexical aspect, also known as semantic aspect, situation aspect, refers to the semantic characteristics inherent in the lexical items which describe the situation. Vendler(1976) proposed a four-way classification of the inherent semantics of verbs----achievement, accomplishment, activity and state. In the most current formulation, Andersen and Shirai (1994:133) maintained that first and second language learners will initially be influenced by the inherent semantic aspect of verbs or predicates in the acquisition of tense and (grammatical) aspect markers associated with or affixed to these verbs. An implicit assumption of the hypothesis is that learners will gradually shift from the initial undergeneralized use of tense/aspect marker to a target-like distribution as their proficiency level increases. The Aspect Hypothesis can be broken down into four separate claims.The data used in this study come from Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SECCL). SECCL is created by Prof. Wen Qiufang at Beijing Foreign Studies University and Prof. Wang Lifei at Nanjing University. The study analyzes 90 pieces of spoken English compositions from SECCL grouped into two proficiency levels ---- intermediate and high. 1886 verb tokens are obtained. Each verb is coded by an inflection type and a lexical aspectual class. The statistical methods such as crosstabulation, Chi-square test and ANOVA are utilized during data processing and results presentation, so are bar graphs and line graphs.Findings drawn from this study on the emergence and function of early inflectional categories of tense and aspect markers in English interlanguage are consistent with many previous researches. As predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis, instructed Chinese learners exhibit association between progressive marking and activities robustly; they link progressive marking with activities; progressive marking is not incorrectly overextended to statives; states show the highest use of simple present and there is an association between present marking and states. These findings from the instructed Chinese learners of English in the present study reinforce earlier findings concerning the relation of inflection to lexical aspect. The results of affinity of certain tense-aspect morphology for verbs of particular lexical aspectual class provide important evidence in support of the Relevance Principle, the Congruence Principle, the One-to-One Principle and the Prototype Theory (Andersen, 1984, 1993; Andersen & Shirai, 1994, 1996; Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Li & Shirai, 2000; Shirai & Andersen, 1995).Contrary to the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis, there is no significant interdependence between perfective marking and telic (accomplishments and achievements) in this study which also finds that the associations between progressive marking and activities, perfective marking and telic verbs strengthen with increasing proficiency level. Some intervening factors and the acquisition stage theory might account for the contradiction to the Aspect Hypothesis.This study has important theoretical and pedagogical implications to English teaching and learning for Chinese students.