| This study examines the emergence of past reference in the interlanguage of 117 American learners of French from the perspective of the Defective Tense Hypothesis (Andersen, 1991). This hypothesis, here referred to as the Aspect Hypothesis following Bardovi-Harlig (1994b), holds that learners will first use verbal morphology to mark aspect (the internal temporal consistency of a situation), rather than tense (the relationship of the situation to a temporal reference point and the moment of speaking). Support for this hypothesis has been provided in a number of recent second language studies for Spanish and English. The Aspect Hypothesis predicts that at early stages in the acquisition of temporal reference, learners associate lexical aspect (the inherent temporal composition of the verb) with grammatical aspect (e.g., passe compose, imperfect for French).;This study extends the investigation of the Aspect Hypothesis in second language research to the classroom acquisition of French. Subjects wrote a narrative and they supplied past forms in a cloze passage. Twelve native speakers of French also performed the tasks as a control group. The narrative and cloze passage were analyzed for targetlike and attempted forms of passe compose and imperfect morphology by aspectual class, using Vendler (1967) categories.;How do adult classroom learners of French use verb morphology to make past time reference? Specifically, does lexical aspect of a verb phrase influence the learners' choice of verb form? The significance of the findings was estimated with the use of statistical analyses (ANOVAs, MANOVAs, t-tests).;A more restrictive interpretation of the Aspect Hypothesis is proposed. Learners not only marked punctual verbs but all dynamic verbs with the passe compose. Their use of imperfect with states is not consistent. In fact, state verbs occur randomly in the present, the imperfect and the passe compose in early stages of acquisition. The robust use of passe compose with dynamic verbs and the relatively late emergence of the imperfect found among the learners, few of whom were true beginners, are accounted for by a tentative analysis of the aspectual features involved. |
