| In the field of L2tense and aspect studies, the present perfect has always been animportant concept for Chinese speaking learners, especially for high school students.In recent years, many scholars have made a great deal of studies from differentperspectives on the comparatively simpler temporal expressions, but little researchhas been conducted on the more complicated temporal concepts or aspectual concepts.In this regard, the present study focuses on the present perfect.In recent decades, many scholars found that tense and aspect are influenced bylinguistic factors such as lexical aspect, verb salience, clause types, narrativestructures and temporal adverbials. Based on the previous studies, this thesis mainlyaims to investigate the influences of lexical aspect and temporal adverbials on theacquisition of the present perfect in English interlanguage of Chinese high schoolstudents by using the Chinese Learners English Corpus.This study focuses on the written production data from the high school studentsub corpus of Chinese Learner English Corpus. By virtue of using indexing toolwithin software tools, the researcher easily finds all the439present perfect obligatorycontexts in the high school corpus. According to the tense/aspect error tags, six mainforms and three main alternatives to the present perfect are used in the obligatorycontext of present perfect.In this study, each verb in the obligatory context was annotated and so was eachtemporal adverbial. Such statistical methods as Chi-square text and Crosstabs wereadopted in the data processing and results presentation.Through the analysis of the data, the results indicate that the high schoolstudents’ uses of present perfect are fairly good in general. The four lexical aspectualcategories have significance among the present perfect use, and the result agrees withthe prediction of Aspect Hypothesis from the exact categories of the lexical aspectualclasses. For temporal adverbials, the present study supports the Functional Hypothesis.The finite verbs modified by temporal adverbials are used less correctly than those without temporal adverbials in the high school corpus. Moreover, the five maincategories of temporal adverbials exert no significant influence on the present perfectvariation at the high school stage. The result may be caused by the fact that theEnglish interlanguage examined in the present study belongs to the morphologicalstage. Though the five main categories of temporal adverbials exert no significantinfluence on the present perfect variation at the high school stage, the varioussubcategories of temporal adverbials play significant roles in the present perfect use.This result shows that the learners even at the morphological stage, some temporaladverbials still have the inhibiting influences on the tense use.The results of the study have both theoretical and pedagogical implications. Itreveals the problems existing in the acquisition of the present perfect system amongstudents of English at the high school level in China as well as the possible causes ofthe problem. Furthermore, the finding of this study can contribute to the study of tenseand aspect of the second language acquisition and facilitate future studies in the fieldof tense and aspect. |
