Language Transfer In Chinese Students' Acquisition Of English Present Perfect Aspect

Markedness theory has become one of the popular topics in the linguistic study for decades. Markedness, first proposed by Trubetzkoy of the Prague School in The Principles of Phonology, refers to the asymmetries within a category and was used to analyze the distinctive features of phoneme. Jakobson applied markedness theory to morphology to describe the contrastive features of inflection. The Prague School insists on the binary opposition of markedness, that is, an element is either marked or unmarked. Then, markedness theory attained its further development under Chomsky's Universal Grammar (UG). Core grammar refers to the rules shared by humans, thus is supposed to be unmarked, whereas peripheral grammar involves the rules idiosyncratic to some certain language, thus is marked.In the mid-20th century, typology school headed by Greenberg found that markedness does not only involve two absolute values, say,"markedness"and"unmarkedness". Typological markedness theory is built on the cross-linguistic comparisons. The scholars believe that markedness possesses different hierarchies and degrees. The higher the markedness is, the more difficult to learn. In the 1970s, Eckman who attempts to introduce typological markedness theory into SLA brought forward Markedness Differential Hypothesis (MDH) in order to predict the difficulties met by learners and the directionality of difficulty. Meanwhile, MDH points out the elements in TL which is different from that in NL are difficult to learn. Hyltenstam (1978, 1984) claimed some feature that is unmarked in NL would be transferred no matter it is marked or not in TL, which means markedness is the condition affecting language transfer. Ellis (1994) mentioned markedness is one of six factors constraining language transfer.Chinese students'English learning is based on the general master of their native language, thus it is unavoidable to be influenced by the knowledge from their mother tongue and other experience. Then, language transfer has to be considered if scholars intend to scientifically explain the cognitive psychology of learning English by Chinese students. Present perfect aspect (PPA) is an aspect difficult to acquire and has been proved to be difficult in English teaching. However, PPA is mainly studied in the whole grammar system; the separate studies to it are less than enough. Therefore, the paper intends to adopt typological markedness theory to analyze language transfer occurred when Chinese college students acquire the five main functions of English present perfect aspect.The following matters are to be studied: 1) 1) When Chinese students learn the unmarked experiential & resultant and continuative PPA, language transfer always occurs. 2) The high marked habitual, repetitive and future PPA are acquired later and more difficult than the low marked. 3) With the help of class instructions and improvement of language proficiency, the learners will better master the marked functions of PPA and show less transfer. The author investigates 90 college students in SISU who are non-English major freshmen and juniors, and English major seniors. Through the analysis of the data processed by SPSS, it comes to the conclusion: 1) if PPA in Chinese is unmarked, negative transfer would happen when English PPA is marked; 2) the functions of high markedness are more difficult to learn; 3) with the improvement of language proficiency, the learners master present perfect better accordingly. But the progress made by the second and third group is not significant which indicates that, the acquisition of present perfect presents fossilization.Finally, the author utilizes markedness theory to analyze the above results, and at the sametime, points out the limitations for further studies.