58,805 research outputs found
Tense-aspect processing in second language learners
This dissertation provides a language processing perspective on the study of second language acquisition (SLA) of tense and aspect. Of special interest are the universal vis-Ă -vis language- specific dimensions of temporal and aspectual semantics involved. According to the Aspect Hypothesis (AH, e.g. Andersen & Shirai, 1994), the initial acquisition and subsequent emergence of (perfective) past tense and progressive aspect morphology follow a semantic-driven, universal sequence. The AH appeals to a cognitive-based prototype account (Shirai & Andersen, 1995), and has gained ample empirical support from offline data in the past two decades. Mounting evidence of transfer, however, has begun to emerge in recent psycholinguistic research, suggesting that grammatical aspectual categories such as the English progressive have non-trivial influence on principles of information organization in language comprehension among L2 learners and bilingual speakers (Stutterheim & Carroll, 2006).
This dissertation undertakes a psycholinguistic investigation of L2 learnersâ processing of English past and progressive morphology. Participants included native English speakers as well as English L2 learners from Korean, German, and Mandarin Chinese backgrounds, whose L1s differ systematically with respect to past and progressive morphology. This cross-linguistic design enabled a systematic testing of both the prototype and transfer hypotheses in one single study. Three word-by-word self-paced reading experiments examined L2 learnersâ automaticity in morphological processing, the universality of tense-aspect prototypes, and aspectual coercion.
Experiment I generated evidence that L2 learners were generally capable of detecting tense- aspect morphosyntactic errors online. Reading time results from Experiment II revealed that L2 learners did not show uniform processing advantages afforded by tense-aspect prototypes. Instead, there exist L1 effects in prototypes, at least from evidence in processing L2 tense-aspect distinctions. Experiment III investigated the processing consequences of aspectual coercion in L2 learners, and results indicated strong L1 influence. The most robust finding across the three experiments is that the L2 learners showed clear L1-based variations in their performance, reflecting a strong tendency for transfer. Notably, these results were obtained after controlling for L2 proficiency and inflected verb form frequencies. A more prominent role of L1 influence is implicated in L2 learnersâ representation of tense-aspect prototypes than previously assumed
Tense, aspect and temporal reference
English exhibits a rich apparatus of tense, aspect, time adverbials and other expressions that
can be used to order states of affairs with respect to each other, or to locate them at a point in
time with respect to the moment of speech. Ideally one would want a semantics for these
expressions to demonstrate that an orderly relationship exists between any one expression and
the meanings it conveys. Yet most existing linguistic and formal semantic accounts leave
something to be desired in this respect, describing natural language temporal categories as
being full of ambiguities and indeterminacies, apparently escaping a uniform semantic description.
It will be argued that this anomaly stems from the assumption that the semantics of these
expressions is directly related to the linear conception of time familiar from temporal logic or
physics - an assumption which can be seen to underly most of the current work on tense and
aspect. According to these theories, the cognitive work involved in the processing of temporal
discourse consists of the ordering of events as points or intervals on a time line or a set of time
lines.
There are, however, good reasons for wondering whether this time concept really is the one
that our linguistic categories are most directly related to; it will be argued that a semantics of
temporally referring expressions and a theory of their use in defining the temporal relations of
events require a different and more complex structure underlying the meaning representations
than is commonly assumed. A semantics will be developed, based on the assumption that
categories like tense, aspect, aspectual adverbials and propositions refer to a mental representation
of events that is structured on other than purely temporal principles, and to which the
notion of a nucleus or consequentially related sequence of preparatory process, goal event and
consequent state is central.
It will be argued that the identification of the correct ontology is a logical preliminary to the
choice of any particular formal representation scheme, as well as being essential in the design
of natural language front-ends for temporal databases. It will be shown how the ontology
developed here can be implemented in a database that contains time-related information about
events and that is to be queried by means of natural language utterances
The acquisition of tense-aspect morphology and the regular-irregular debate
This paper reviews research on English past-tense acquisition to test the validity of the single mechanism model and the dual mechanism model, focusing on regular-irregular dissociation and semantic bias. Based on the review, it is suggested that in L1 acquisition, both regular and irregular verbs are governed by semantics; that is, early use of past tense forms are restricted to achievement verbsâregular or irregular. In contrast, some L2 acquisition studies show stronger semantic bias for regular past tense forms (e.g., Housen, 2002, Rohde, 1996). It is argued that L1 acquisition of the past-tense morphology can be accounted for more adequately by the single-mechanism model
Marked uses of tense/aspect morphology and situation type
In this study explanations are sought for the often reported associations in child language between tense/aspect morphology and situation type. The study is done on the basis of adult-adult data, child language and input language to the children. First of all it is shown that the associations are natural, since they are strong in adult-adult English as well. Only in the early stages does child language differ from this distribution, in that the associations are either stronger or different. Input data appear to account to a large extent for these differing patterns. An additional explanation is found in the discourse topics: within the context of talking about the here-and-now, the combinations of morphology and situation type that can be seen as unmarked suffice. In the context of talking about past events and of giving general comments about the world, marked combinations are necessary. It is shown that children in and their parents at the early ages mainly talk about the here-and-now, whereas adults among themselves hardly ever do so. Later, describing past events and commenting on the world becomes more frequent in child language and input, and, as a consequence, marked combinations of tense/aspect morphology and situation types increase in use
Topological Modelling of Grammatical and Lexical Aspect in English
It is assumed that aspect in both cases â as a process-profiling category â is analogous to the profiling of things and atemporal relations (in the sense of Langacker 1987, 1990, 2000), given the maximisation of the temporal domain in the characterisation of processes (perfective and imperfective, hence: dynamic and stative), and minimalisation of the temporal domain during the conceptualisation of things (conceptually independent entities) and atemporal relations (conceptually dependent atemporal configurations). The analogy between nouns and verbs in terms of âgranularityâ has been so far variously addressed by Langacker (1990), Jackendoff (1991) and Talmy (2001), and also constitutes the core assumption in my research on topological modelling
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