| revious studies of first and second language learners have evidenced a skewed distribution of verb inflections that correlates with inherent aspectual distinctions. This study addresses a specific interpretation of these findings, the "primacy of aspect" hypothesis, which asserts that in language acquisition, verb inflections initially mark lexical aspect--the temporal qualities inherent in the sense of a predicate, detached from any reference point--regardless of their role in the target language.;This hypothesis was tested for second language acquisition by analyzing a cross-section of Spanish-English interlanguages, correlating the use of verb morphology with lexical aspect and tense. The study also examined variation in the distribution of inflections as a function of proficiency level, 26 Spanish speakers being grouped into four proficiency levels. To determine whether aspectual marking in the interlanguages might be derived from a distributional bias in the target language, the same analytic procedures were applied to data from three native English speakers.;Nine operational tests--which entail inserting a base-form predicate into a frame and then assessing the result--were applied to each of over 7000 predicates in the corpus. The tests assess three dimensions of lexical aspect, which interact to form six aspectual categories. The meaning and validity of these categories is discussed.;The study confirms the basic hypothesis, that learners use inflections to mark lexical aspect in non-native-like ways. The results of... |
