Chapter 10. Data Analysis: Quantitative approaches

Previous studies indicate that even Advanced learners of English as a Foreign Language and speakers of English as a Second Language extend the progressive to stative verbs, contrary to the predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis (AH). We test this claim based on a corpus of beginning and lower intermediate learner writing produced by speakers of three languages with and three without a progressive. In contrast to previous studies, we measure the frequency of stative progressives using the variable context method, which is frequently used in research on dialectal variation. Results reveal that stative progressives are very rare at the beginning/lower intermediate level, regardless of the presence of a progressive in the learners’ L1, confirming the claim of the AH for beginning and lower intermediate learners. Moreover, stative progressives mostly occur in contexts that are grammatical in native usage, especially in the interlanguage of learners with a progressive in their L1.

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The Lexical Aspect Hypothesis

Martins¹,

Pinharanda-Nunes

2020

Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics

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This chapter investigates the acquisition of tense and aspect by Chinese learners of Portuguese as an L2 from a variationist perspective (Bayley, 2013). Difficulties in acquiring the aspectual contrasts set by the Perfect Preterit and Imperfect Preterit tenses in Romance languages have been widely documented (Blyth, 2005; Giacalone-Ramat, 2002; Kihlstedt, 2002; Martins, 2008). This study investigates the role of <lexical aspect> for the marking of Perfect and Imperfect Preterit following the tenets of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH). It intends to design a different look into the LAH, as it considers other variables in interaction. Results show that lexical aspect plays a significant role in the learners’ use of inflectional morphology for both verb tenses, showing the dynamics of the interlanguage continuum.

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Chapter 10. Data Analysis: Quantitative approaches

Cited by 6 publications

References 21 publications

Tense and aspect in Second Language Acquisition and learner corpus research

Tense and aspect in Second Language Acquisition and learner corpus research

The use of stative progressives by school-age learners of English and the importance of the variable context

The Lexical Aspect Hypothesis

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