Hostname: page-component-7dd5485656-zlgnt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-10-31T03:46:17.279Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Primacy of Aspect

Aspectual Marking in English Interlanguage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 November 2008

Richard E. Robison
Richard E. Robison
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Studies of first and second language acquisition have indicated that when verbal morphemes first appear, they tend to mark aspectual distinctions in non-native-like ways. This study tested the hypothesis that in L2 acquisition, verbal morphemes initially mark lexical aspect—the temporal features inherent in the semantics of a predicate, independent of the time line—regardless of their function in the target language. To reduce the subjectivity that has weakened previous studies, operational tests—which entailed inserting a base-form verb phrase into a frame and then judging whether the result is acceptable—were used to determine lexical aspect for each of over 550 verb tokens in the corpus, based on an interlanguage sample from a native speaker of Spanish. The results of a chi-square test allow rejection of the null hypothesis—that lexical aspect and morphology are independent—at the .001 confidence level. Past marking was found to correlate with punctual aspect, -ing with durative.

Information

Type
Articles
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 12 , Issue 3 , September 1990 , pp. 315 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1990

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

REFERENCES

Andersen, R. (1986). Interpreting data: Second language acquisition of verbal aspect. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Andersen, R. (in press). Developmental sequences: The emergence of aspect marking in second language acquisition. In Huebner, T. & Ferguson, C. A. (Eds.), Cross-currents in second language acquisition and linguistic theories. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Antinucci, F., & Miller, R. (1976). How children talk about what happened. Journal of Child Language, 3, 169–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bickerton, D. (1981). Roots of language. Ann Arbor, MI: Karoma.Google Scholar
Bloom, L., Lifter, K., & Afitz, J. (1980). Semantics of verbs and the development of verb inflection in child language. Language, 56, 386–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bronckart, J. P., & Sinclair, H. (1973). Time, tense, and aspect. Cognition, 2, 107–130.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Comrie, B. (1976). Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Economides, P. J. (1985). The expression of tense and aspect in the English interlanguage of a Vietnamese child. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Flashner, V. (1982). The English interlanguage of three native speakers of Russian: Two perspectives. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Klein, W. (1986). Reference to time: A frame of analysis. Unpublished manuscript, ESF Project, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands.Google Scholar
Kumpf, L. (1982). Tense, aspect, and modality in interlanguage: A discourse-functional approach. Paper presented at the 1982 TESOL convention, Honolulu, Hawaii.Google Scholar
Lakoff, G. (1966). Stative verbs and adjectives in English. Harvard Computational Laboratory Report NSF-17, Harvard, MA.Google Scholar
Mourelatos, A. (1978). Events, processes, and states. Language and Philosophy, 2, 415–434.Google Scholar
Rothstein, G. (1985). The expression of temporality in the English interlanguage of a native Hebrew speaker. Unpublished Master's thesis, University of California, Los Angeles.Google Scholar
Sag, I. (1973). On the state of progress on progressives and statives. In Bailey, C.-J. N. & Shuy, R. (Eds.), New ways of variation in English (pp. 83–95). Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.Google Scholar
Schumann, J. (1987). The expression of temporality in basilang speech. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 9, 21–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stauble, A.-M. (1978). The process of decreolization: A model for second language development. Language Learning, 28, 29–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weist, R. M., Wysocka, H., Witdowska-Stadnick, K., Buczowska, W., & Konieczna, E. (1984). The defective tense hypothesis: On the emergence of tense and aspect in child Polish. Journal of Child Language, 11, 347–374.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed