Acquisition of tense-aspect morphology by English learners of French and Chinese

The present dissertation investigates the acquisition processes involved in the learning of French and Chinese tense-aspect morphology by English speakers. The objective is to test the Prototype Hypothesis, which states that, in general, learners first acquire the prototypical members of a grammatical category and gradually extend their knowledge to the non-prototypical members. The Prototype Hypothesis treats tense-aspect morphology as a prototype category, and it states that the prototypical features of the perfective aspect (or simple past tense) are [+ result], [+ punctual] and [+ telic] whereas the prototypical features of the imperfective aspect are [- result], [- punctual] and [- telic]. The Prototype Hypothesis is developed from the Aspect Hypothesis and explains the relationship between tense-aspect morphology and the inherent lexical aspect of the predicates.; The dissertation starts with an explicit explanation on how the tense-aspect systems work in both Chinese and French. Following the theoretical explanation is a review of the previous studies done on the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology, with a special focus on the acquisition process in learning French and Chinese. The present dissertation is based on an empirical study where learners performed a series of comprehension and production activities including one comprehension task, three compositions, one cloze test in French and one written editing task in Chinese. The results from the French data as well as from the Chinese data showed support for the Prototype Hypothesis. Both the distribution and the accuracy in the use of tense-aspect morphology in both languages were influenced by the inherent lexical aspect of the predicates. The effect was more evident in French than in Chinese. More traces of the influence of lexical aspect were found in the compositions than in the cloze test among the learners of French whereas more evidence was found in the written editing task than in the compositions among the learners of Chinese.; The differences in the results between Chinese and French can be explained by the differences in the tense-aspect systems of the two languages. Lexical aspect plays a more important role in the tense-aspect system in French than in Chinese.; The present dissertation contributes to the research on the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in two ways: first, it provides much-needed empirical evidence on the influence of lexical aspect in the acquisition of Chinese; and second, it gives a contrastive analysis of the acquisition processes of an Indo-European language and a non-Indo-European language.