A Study Of Tense-aspect Acquisition Of English Verbs Under The Framework Of Markedness Theory

In recent decades, the study on the acquisition of tense and aspect has gradually becomeone of flourishing topics in the field of SLA. The research in this field has been studied byscholars and linguists abroad from various perspectives since earlier time. They haveillustrated it in a detailed way and analyzed it deeply from the perspectives of semantics,pragmatics, psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics etc. Nevertheless, there are rare studiestaking into account the influence of functional complexity and markedness on the acquisitionof English tense and aspect. The word ‘markedness’ concerns the phenomenon ofasymmetries in a category. The concept of ‘markedness’ was put forward by linguistTrubetzkoy in his famous book called “Principles of Phonology”. Markedness theory wasoriginally being applied to systematically analyze the distinctive features in the field ofPhonology. Linguist Jacobson expanded the theory into the field of morphology. In1970s, theeminent scholar Eckman made the great contribution of introducing the theory into the fieldof second language acquisition.This thesis investigates and studies the acquisition of the simple past tense and the pastprogressive aspect as well as aims to deeply explore the influence of tense-aspect functionalmarkedness on language acquisition. The following questions are about to be deeply analyzedand studied:(1) Whether the degree of the acquisition of the simple past tense and the pastprogressive aspect varies in terms of different English proficiency level?(2) How markedness influences the acquisition of various functions and meaning of thesimple past tense and the past progressive aspect?The author applies the method of empirical research and investigates90college students’acquisition on the simple past tense and the past progressive aspect with the aid of a testnamed “true or false judgment”. The research subjects are made up of50non-English majorswho have not passed CET-4and40English majors who have passed TEM-4. The relativedata collected will be analyzed by SPSS and the results and conclusions are made in thefollowings: (1) The degree of the acquisition of the simple past tense and the past progressiveaspect by language learners of different proficiency levels are not significantly different. Thatis to say, it is possibly the phenomenon of fossilization that influences English learners’acquisition of tense and aspect.(2) As to the four functions of the simple past tense and the five functions involved inthe past progressive aspect, the acquisition of unmarked functions in a category are by andlarge prior to the acquisition of comparative marked functions, which is correspondence withthe markedness hypothesis.(3) The accuracy rate of the unmarked functions and that of the marked functions in onecategory are no of significant distinction, namely, it is language input that plays an importantrole in the process of language acquisition.(4) It can be concluded by means of analyzing the data of the empirical research that theaccuracy rate of the functions of the simple past tense is generally higher than that of thefunctions of the past progressive aspect for participants. That is to say, the research subjectshave a better mastery of functions of the simple past tense in comparison the past progressiveaspect, namely, the markedness in one catogory has played an important role for languagelearners in their process of acquiring a second language.Based on the above findings, the author utilizes some valuable theories in the field ofsecond language acquisition so as to analyze relative research data and presents theunderlying reasons on the acquisition order. At last, some pedagogical significance andrelative limitations of the empirical research are revealed.