基于语料库的中国理工科大学生英语口语中时体习得研究

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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Previous Researches

The expression of time is one of the central conceptual domains of language, and

the acquisition of the ability to talk about time is one of the earliest tasks in language

acquisition. Speakers can talk about things in the past, in the present and in the future

and describe events as ongoing or completed. As for how to express time, languages

boast different temporality.

In English, a variety of structures are used to express different time references,

among which tense and aspect, reflected in verb inflections, are the most important

(DeCapua, 2008). Tense is a grammaticalized expression of location in time, whereas

aspect characterizes the internal temporality of that event (Comrie, 1976, 1985). That

is to say, tense relates the time of the situation described to the present moment while

aspect describes the internal temporal constituent of that situation. They are combined

to express time of the event. Generally speaking, there are three tenses in English:

present tense, past tense and future tense, and two aspects: perfective and progressive.

Tense markers and aspect markers are all shown in verbs’ morphology. For example,

in the English sentence “she was reading”, “was”, which is the past form of “be” is

the past tense marker in this sentence indicating that the event (here reading) took

place before the speaker’s speaking time, while “-ing” is a progressive aspect marker

showing that at that situation the event (reading) was ongoing.

However, Chinese is regarded as a tenseless language but with a complicated

system of aspect (Li & Thompson, 1981). As for “tenseless”, it does not mean that

there is no conceptual distinction between past, present and future time in Chinese,

only that time is indicated through other ways such as temporal adverbials, discourse

strategy etc, rather than tense markers. For example, in the following Chinese

sentence “ 她昨天去了学校”, tense (here the past tense) is expressed through

temporal adverbial “昨天”, while in English, tense is expressed through tense markers

of verbs (here “went” is enough to show the past tense ). Also in this Chinese sentence,

“了” is a perfective aspect marker, indicating that the action has finished. Besides

“了”, there are some other aspect markers in Chinese such as “过”, “着”, “在”, etc.

The significant differences between Chinese and English tense-aspect systems

cause great trouble and a lot of problems in Chinese students’ second language

acquisition (SLA) (Shirai, 2004). That is why researchers in SLA have laid great

emphasis on English tense-aspect acquisition. Since the 1970s, tense-aspect

acquisition has gradually become a separate field in SLA (Wu Ping & Tian Yuan,

2008). Researchers have studied tense-aspect acquisition from various perspectives

such as morphology, semantics and discourse analysis etc. and established many

theoretical frameworks like aspect hypothesis, discourse hypothesis, and primacy of

A Corpus-Based Study on Oral Tense-Aspect Acquisition of Chinese Science and Engineering Majors

aspect hypothesis etc. But it seems that all these researches are theory-oriented, which

are based on small scales of empirical analysis. Since the 1980s, various corpuses,

especially learner corpuses, have been built and will be built on the basis of

increasingly well-developed computer technology. By corpus-based approach it is

possible to analyze large numbers of natural texts, patterns of use and even errors

easily and conveniently through the computer’s automatic and interactive techniques

as well as its qualitative and quantitative analytical techniques. From then on, studies

on English tense-aspect acquisition tend to focus on corpus-based approach, such as

studies on learner corpora and tense-aspect education (Aijmer, 2004), on corpus and

misuses of tense (Dai Junyan, 2008), and on tests of the tense-aspect related

hypotheses (Cai Jinting, 2003; Wang Jing, 2007) etc.

Specifically, with regard to the researches on Chinese Learners’ acquisition of

English tense and aspect system, Sun (1997) was the first to make an investigation on

12 Chinese English learners’ interlanguage to explore the effects of differences and

similarities between First Language (L1) and Second Language (L2) on acquiring

English tense and aspect. Following him, Cai Jinting discusses a lot on Chinese

English learners’ past tense acquisition. He bases his studies mainly on 120 narratives

written by Chinese English learners and thinks that there are many elements that can

exert influence on English past tense acquisition such as discourse structure (Cai

Jinting, 2003), Chinese aspect marker “了” (Cai Jinting, 2004), and verb salience (Cai

Jinting & Chen Hui, 2005) etc. Afterwards, many researchers concentrate on the

misuse of English tense-aspect by Chinese learners and most of them have laid their

basis on Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) which consists of five small

corpuses, namely ST2 (middle school students), ST3 (non-English majors at lower

level), ST4 (non-English majors at higher level), ST5 (English majors at lower level),

and ST6 (English majors at higher level). For example, Han Cunxin & Fan Bin (2007)

explore the misuse of present perfect in middle school students’ writings by analyzing

ST2; Duan Manfu (2005) discusses the misuse of tense-aspect by non-English majors

on the basis of analyzing ST3 and ST4, and Liu Yang (2008) investigates the misuse

of tense-aspect by English majors based on studying ST5 and ST6. As for studies on

English oral tense-aspect acquisition based on corpuses, researchers tend to focus on

past tense acquisition and have analyzed the elements that can exert influences on it

mainly by analyzing Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL). They

think that temporal adverbials, position of verbs and even discourse structures can

influence learners’ oral tense-aspect acquisition (Chen Xuan, 2005; Sun Li & Cai

Jinting, 2005; Yang Yanfeng, 2007).

1.2 Significance of the Present Study

From the above brief review of the previous researches on tense-aspect

acquisition, especially those based on corpus, it is clear that these studies, on the one

hand, reveal learners’ misuses of English tense-aspect and, on the other hand, propose

suggestions for English tense-aspect teaching.

Chapter One Introduction

However, it is found that there are some insufficiencies in them. It seems that

researchers showed much more interest in written language than in spoken language

and they tend to ignore students of science and engineering background, who take up

nearly 70% of all the college students according to the recruiting plan of Ministry of

Education (retrieved 6 Sep., 2010 form http://www.ruohai.net/news/201004/0955963.html ).

Therefore, in order to complement the studies on tense-aspect acquisition, the

author of the present thesis focuses on science and engineering majors’ (SEMs) oral

tense-aspect acquisition, aiming to explore the overall distribution of their use of

English tense-aspect and find out the most problematic tense-aspects for them and

why they commit so many errors on it (them). And at last the thesis provides some

suggestions for English tense-aspect teaching especially for science and engineering

majors. In order to reveal information on a large scale, the author employs a

corpus-based study. The corpora employed in this thesis are established from data

collected from English oral classes in five science and engineering universities in

China. Thus the findings of the current research can be representative of SEMs, and

efficient learning and teaching suggestions can be achieved to fulfill the needs of this

particular group of English learners.

1.3Research Questions

The present study analyzes the use of English tense-aspect, specifically the rate

of each tense-aspect used in SEMs’ oral English. By comparing the rates, it can show

the most preferably used tense-aspect by this group of students. The author can also

find out the most problematic tense-aspect by counting the correct use and incorrect

or improper use of each tense-aspect. The top six problematic tense-aspects will be

discussed in great detail by analyzing the types of misuse such as misuse of

tense-aspect form, wrong choice of tense-aspect, and tense-aspect disagreement

between or among clauses. In this thesis “misuse” is used as a cover term for all ways

of being wrong in tense-aspect by Chinese English learners. Although Corder (1967)

distinguishes errors from mistakes by claiming that errors are associated with failures

in competence while mistakes reflect failures in performance, in reality, especially in

spoken language, it is hard to distinct errors from mistakes so clearly, as failures in

language competence can also result in failures in language performance which is

usually is the starting point of corpus linguistics.

Based on the above analysis, the present study aims to answer the following

three questions:

1) What is the overall distribution of the use of tense-aspect by Chinese

science and engineering majors in their oral English?

2) What are the main misuses in their use of tense-aspect?

3) What are the possible factors that cause their misuses in tense-aspect?

A Corpus-Based Study on Oral Tense-Aspect Acquisition of Chinese Science and Engineering Majors

1.4 Configuration of the Thesis

This thesis consists of five chapters:

Chapter 1, the present chapter, points out the significance of the study as well as

its research questions by reviewing the relevant previous researches.

Chapter 2 is the literature review of this thesis, which sets up a theoretical

foundation by reviewing the related theories of the present study including Tense and

Aspect，Error Analysis and Corpus Linguistics.

Chapter 3 presents the research methods for the present study, which are

composed of theoretical considerations of the present study, source of data, data

collection, data classification, data processing and the instruments used in the present

study, etc.

Chapter 4 analyzes the data and discusses the types of misuses in English

tense-aspect as well as the possible causes behind the findings.

Chapter 5 concludes the thesis with not only a summary of major findings from

the research but also the pedagogical implications gained from the study．

In addition，

limitations of the present study will be pointed out and some directions for further

research in this field will be suggested.

Chapter Two Literature Review

The acquisition of English tense-aspect is one of the most difficult grammatical

points for Chinese learners in both written and spoken language. Even some English

majors have difficulty in using it, let alone SEMs, most of whom have lower

motivation than English majors in learning English. English tense-aspect and its

acquisition by L2 learners have been studied by enormous researchers. This chapter

first presents the relevant theory of tense and aspect since they are the subject of this

study. And then the theories of Error Analysis and Corpus Linguistics are reviewed as

they are the main source of the approaches applied in this thesis. These three groups

of theories lay the theoretical foundation of this research.

2.1 Tense and Aspect

In this part, some representative definitions of tense and aspect will be listed and

four influential models related to English tense-aspect system will be introduced

followed by brief comments.

2.1.1 Views on Tense and Aspect

Although the concept of tense occurred several thousand years ago, ascending far

back to the period of Aristotle, its definition still is a controversial issue. Different

linguists have different viewpoints. There is a heated debate over its definition

between the traditional school and the modern school. Their dispute concerns whether

the two grammatical categories, tense and aspect, should be separated or not.

The traditional school argues that there should be no separation between tense

and aspect. They think that by tense people can understand a particular form of verb,

or a verb group, by means of which they show to what time sphere an action or state

is considered to belong (Poutsma, 1926); Curme (1931) also shows support for this by

assuming that there are four absolute tenses and two relative tenses, with the former

four referring to present, past, present perfect and future, which express time from the

standpoint of the moment in which the speaker is speaking without reference to some

other act; and with the latter two referring to past perfect and future perfect which

express time relatively to the preceding absolute tenses. Zhang Daozhen (1995) also

denies the separation of aspect. But unlike Curme, he proposes that time has four parts:

present, past, future and past future. In addition, he views that action has four types:

the indefinite, the progressive, the perfect and the perfect progressive. The

combination of these time concepts and actions results in sixteen tenses. The

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (1995) also defines that tense is any of

the forms of a verb that shows the time, continuance or completion of an action or

state that is expressed by the verb without specifying aspect.

Although the above scholars differ in their interpretations, they all consider tense

A Corpus-Based Study on Oral Tense-Aspect Acquisition of Chinese Science and Engineering Majors

from dual functions: one is to indicate time and the other is to describe the aspect of

verb. That is to say, aspect is included in tense. However, the modern school

advocates that there should be a clear distinction between tense and aspect because of

their significant differences.

According to Comrie (1976, 1985), tense is a deictic category locating situation

in time, while aspect is not concerned with relating the time of the situation to any

other time-point, but with the internal temporal consistency of one situation. Leech &

Svartvic (1975) also propose to separate aspect from tense because they think that by

tense people understand the correspondence between the form of the verb and the

concept of time, while by aspect, speakers as well as hearers can get the information

of the manner in which a verbal action is experienced or regarded. As for the

similarities and differences between tense and aspect, Biber et al. (2000) hold that

both tense and aspect relate primarily to time distinctions in the verb phrase. However,

whereas tense refers primarily to past and present time orientation, aspect refers to

considerations such as the completion or lack of completion of events or states

described by a verb. Hu Zhuanglin (2001) and Evans & Green (2005) also belong to

the modern school. They agree that tense is deictic, indicating time relative to the time

of utterance while aspect in not deictic and it does not indicate time relative to the

time of utterances but shows where the event is in the process. Although they interpret

tense and aspect from different perspectives, all the above modern school supporters

subscribe to the idea that tense and aspect are two different grammatical categories.

This thesis, as the title indicates, stands on the side of modern school and

separates tense and aspect as two different categories theoretically, because their

meanings are significantly different.

2.1.2 Influential Models

Starting from the above views and definitions of tense and aspect, linguists

developed various influential models of English tense-aspect system, four of which

will be introduced in the following part.

2.1.2.1 Reichenbach’s Model

Reichenbach (quoted in Declerck 1991, p.224) was influential in the study of

tense in the 1940s. According to him, there are at most three points in time relevant to

the choice of tense in a given sentence. They are S, E and R. S represents the point of

speech, namely, the time when the sentence is uttered; E represents the point of the

event, namely, the time when the action or event happens; and R represents the point

of reference indicating the time from which the action or event is viewed which could

be clearly identified by a temporal adverbial or expressions of time mentioned in the

preceding context. For instance, in the sentence “When my mum came home, I had

already finished my homework”, S is the time when this sentence is uttered. E is the

time when I finish my homework, and R is the time when mum came home. For

another example, in the following sentence “By 5 a.m., Mary had left home”, S is the

time of utterance; E is the time when Mary leaves home; R is 5 a.m..

Due to the distinction of these three points in time, the meanings of different

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摘要：

ChapterOneIntroduction1ChapterOneIntroduction1.1PreviousResearchesTheexpressionoftimeisoneofthecentralconceptualdomainsoflanguage,andtheacquisitionoftheabilitytotalkabouttimeisoneoftheearliesttasksinlanguageacquisition.Speakerscantalkaboutthingsinthepast,inthepresentandinthefutureanddescribeeventsas...

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