A Probe Into The Acquisition Of English Perfect Aspect By Advanced Chinese EFL Learners

English perfect aspect has long been the focus in second language acquisition research and English teaching in China.Although substantial achievements have been made in this area,most domestic researches on the perfect aspect acquisition by Chinese learners of English have been focusing on describing and categorizing language representations merely from the perspective of language transfer,and little attention has been paid to the in-depth analysis of the conceptual transfer concerning the different ways of English and Chinese thinking.Considering such deficiency in relevant research,this thesis uses a corpus-based research method by means of self-built oral corpus and Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners(the TECCL corpus)(Version 1.1)with a view to probing into the perfect aspect acquisition behavior demonstrated by Chinese advanced learners of English,and analyzing the underlying reasons behind it from the perspective of Wang Wenbin's(2013a,2013b,2019)view about "the differences between the English trait of pro-temporal thinking and the Chinese trait of pro-spatial thinking ".There are three main findings presented in this paper:(1)Chinese advanced learners of English have a pervasive problem of mixing up and overlooking past tense markers and perfect aspect markers attached to predicate verbs;(2)Even though they are advanced learners of English,their perfect aspect error rate is second only to the simple aspect with its highest frequency of use.Their present perfect usage rate is higher than the past perfect,and the error rate of the past perfect is higher than the present perfect;(3)There is a phenomenon of self-repair of aspect markers in their spoken English and written English.The result of this research shows that the acquisition behavior demonstrated by Chinese advanced learners of English can be mainly attributed to the language transfer of the Chinese sentences which lack past tense markers and perfect aspect markers attached to their predicate verbs.Its fundamental cause lies in the Chinese people's strong preference for their spatial mode of thinking,namely,its root cause consists in the conceptual transfer of the prominently spatial way of Chinese thinking.