The Effects Of The Aspect Hypothesis On The Usage Of Progressive Aspect By Chinese Learners

Tense\aspect system is considered to be one of the important contents in the second language acquisition for it is difficult for Chinese learners to acquire. So many researchers have done lots of work on the acquisition of tense\aspect system from various perspectives (Anderson,1986,1991; Bardovi-Harlig,1992,1995; Robison.1995; Cai,2002,2004). Based on the previous studies, it can be inferred that aspect hypothesis is one of the important factors which greatly affects the acquisition of progressive aspect.Since lexical hypothesis was proposed, many linguists had examined this theory in various ways (text cloze, interview or questionnaire). Although most of the results turned out to be consistent with the hypothesis, some of the findings were the counterevidence to the hypothesis. Therefore, we need more evidence to further check this hypothesis. Based on Anderson&Shirai" version of aspect hypothesis, the present study is concerned with progressive aspect, we focus on the third and fourth items of aspect hypothesis, i.e.,③In languages that have progressive aspect, progressive marking begins with activity verbs, and then extends to accomplishment or achievement.④Progressive marking is rarely incorrectly overextended to stative verbs. Based on the CLEC corpus (ST2, ST4and ST6) and BROWN corpus, after collecting and analyzing data, the three findings were obtained as below:(1) Aspect hypothesis also influences Chinese learners in their acquisition of progressive aspect. The results infer that progressive aspect tend to combine with activities, followed by accomplishments and achievements, and lastly statives, i.e. the percentage sequence from the highest to lowest are:activities> accomplishments> achievements> statives. The results are consistent with the predication of aspect hypothesis, thus the Chinese learners’corpus is also consistent with the predication of aspect hypothesis.(2) Different proficiency level has different usage of progressive aspect. Among them, high school students are more likely to use progressive aspect than the other two groups. The most proficiency level (English majored students) is the most skilled one in using progressive aspect, i.e., they tend to use the complex forms of progressive aspect.(3) Chinese learners tend to use less be+Ving constructions than English native speakers especially.the complex constructions, such as being+Ving and been+Ving.