The L2 acquisition of the Chinese aspect marking

Suying Yang*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in book/report/conference proceedingConference proceedingpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

By analyzing corpus data, we have shown that the tendencies of restricting perfective past marking to Accomplishments and Achievements and imperfective marking to Statives and Activities as described by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai, 1991; Andersen & Shirai, 1996), undesirable in the acquisition of various languages, are desirable in the acquisition of a language like Chinese, because these tendencies coincide with the natural occurrence patterns of-le and-zhe. We argue that different languages may observe the same natural language principle (Bybee's Relevance Principle) in different ways, rendering the learner tendencies desirable or undesirable in the acquisition processes. Based on our new observations, we propose some modifications to the Aspect Hypothesis.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2014
EditorsPrachya Boonkwan, Wirote Aroonmanakun, Thepchai Supnithi
PublisherFaculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Chulalongkorn University
Pages299-308
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9786165518871
Publication statusPublished - 2014
Event28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2014 - Phuket, Thailand, Phuket, Thailand
Duration: 12 Dec 201414 Dec 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2014

Conference

Conference28th Pacific Asia Conference on Language, Information and Computation, PACLIC 2014
Country/TerritoryThailand
CityPhuket
Period12/12/1414/12/14

Scopus Subject Areas

  • Language and Linguistics
  • Computer Science (miscellaneous)

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