On Acquisition Of English Present Perfect Tense By English Majors:a Corpus-Based Study

Tense-aspect is an extremely important part in learning process, although it is rather difficult. Teaching practice indicates that even high proficiency level learners make mistakes in tense-aspect. Tense-aspect acquisition is influenced by many linguistic factors, such as verb saliency, lexical aspect, temporal adverbials, clause types and narrative structure. Form and meaning are two inseparable parts in language acquisition, so this study is designed to explore the influences of verb saliency and lexical aspect on the use of English present perfect tense and the association between proficiency level and the two linguistic factors.The study is based on Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners. Timed compositions of sophomore and senior students are extracted as written English and spoken English are composed of spoken materials in TEM4and TEM8. There are altogether4216texts and all English present perfect tense are retrieved. Regular verbs and irregular verbs are encoded according to verb saliency and all verbs are marked according to lexical aspectual classes. Such statistical methods as T-test, One-way ANOVA, Crosstabs and Chi-square test are adopted in data processing.The results indicate that English majors have a good command of English present perfect tense on the whole. For verb saliency, the distributions of regular and irregular verbs are congruent with Saliency Hypothesis, which claims that irregular verbs are acquired earlier than regular verbs. However, the hypothesis can only be completely proved to be true in spoken English. English learners’performance on regular and irregular verbs improves with the development of their proficiency level. For lexical aspect, English majors have acquired the inherent semantic features of the four lexical aspectual classes on the whole. With the improvement of proficiency level, they can more flexibly use the four lexical aspectual classes. However, high proficiency level learners’use of the four lexical aspectual classes does not totally support Aspect Hypothesis.The present study has both theoretical and pedagogical implications. It can deepen the comprehension of tense-aspect. Moreover, the present study may provide some suggestions for English tense-aspect teaching and learning, and shed some light on further research.