The Acquisition Of English Past Tense Feature By Chinese Learners

Within the framework of Minimalist Program, this thesis is dedicated to study the acquisition of English past tense feature by Chinese learners and explore whether their interlanguage syntactic system is impaired or not. Further more, the present study aims to investigate the relation between the internal past tense feature and the external past tense markings and also look for reasonable explanations for the omission of past tense markings in second language production.The spoken and written texts in Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners are adopted as the data source for the empirical study. We conclude our research findings as follows: first of all, Chinese L2 English learners are able to acquire the past tense feature, so they can well produce the past tense markings in both spoken and written English; secondly, Chinese L2 English learners sometimes omit the past tense markings in both spoken and written English, and the omission rate in spoken English is significantly higher than that in written English. Thirdly, Chinese L2 English learners have acquired the past tense feature, but they produce correct past tense markings of regular verbs and irregular verbs asymmetrically in both spoken and written English. Irregular verbs are inflected more accurately than regular verbs. This thesis argues that the interlanguage syntactic system of Chinese L2 English learners is in good condition, and the omission of inflectional morphology of thematic verbs in production doesn’t imply that Chinese L2 English learners haven’t acquired the past tense feature and this phenomenon is explained from the perspective of Distributed Morphology. In addition, this thesis indicates the extra-linguistic factors affect the production of past tense markings. It causes the omission rate of past tense markings in spoken English is significantly higher than that in written English. Finally, this study also explains the asymmetric phenomenon that the inflected rate of irregular verbs is higher than regular verbs from the perspective of verb salience.The present study is conductive to further understand the acquisition of English past tense feature and also the characteristics of past tense markings produced by Chinese learners. We expect it is able to provide some theoretical references for English teaching.