ACQUISITION OF TENSE-ASPECT MORPHOLOGY BY ENGLISH LEARNERS OF FRENCH AND CHINESE By HONGLI FAN A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2005 To My Parents ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my advisor, Dr. Theresa A. Antes, for her consistent encouragement, support, and help throughout my doctoral studies and particularly for her assistance with this dissertation. Thanks go to other committee members Dr. Jean Casagrande and Dr. Diane Boxer, especially to Dr. Joaquim Camps and Dr. Chauncey Chu, for their expert input and suggestions on theoretical as well as methodological issues. The guidance from all of these professors and many others at the University of Florida has helped put me on the right track to be a mature and independent scholar. I am also indebted to the following good friends and colleagues: Sophie Ganachaud, Barbara Petrosky, David Petrosky, Bin Li, Jinping Zhu and many others who have helped with the design and analysis of the activities. Finally, my gratitude goes to my husband Xuan Meng for his love and encouragement. It is also important that I acknowledge my son Raymond Meng who has been a sweet and cooperative boy throughout the project. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii LIST OF TABLES............................................................................................................ vii ABSTRACT.........................................................................................................................x CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................1 2 THEORETICAL ISSUES............................................................................................5 Tense and Aspect..........................................................................................................5 Tense......................................................................................................................6 Aspect....................................................................................................................7 Interaction between tense and aspect ..................................................................10 Tense and Aspect in French and Chinese...................................................................11 French..................................................................................................................11 Chinese ................................................................................................................14 Tense in Chinese ..........................................................................................14 Aspect in Chinese.........................................................................................18 Summary of Grammatical Tense and Aspect .............................................................22 Lexical Aspect ............................................................................................................24 Between Lexical Aspect and Grammatical Aspect ....................................................27 3 ACQUISITIONAL STUDIES....................................................................................30 Aspect Hypothesis and Related Studies .....................................................................30 Major Studies on the Aspect Hypothesis....................................................................33 Discourse Hypothesis .................................................................................................36 Studies on the Acquisition of French as a Second Language.....................................37 Untutored Learners..............................................................................................37 Tutored Learners .................................................................................................41 Immersion learners.......................................................................................41 Beginning and intermediate foreign language learners................................43 Advanced foreign language learners:...........................................................46 Studies on the Acquisition of Chinese........................................................................48 L1 Acquisition of Chinese Temporality..............................................................49 L2 Acquisition of Chinese Temporality..............................................................52 iv Distributional Bias Hypothesis and Prototype Hypothesis.........................................56 4 METHODOLOGY .....................................................................................................61 Participants .................................................................................................................61 French and Chinese Programs ....................................................................................62 French and Chinese Textbooks...................................................................................63 Tasks...........................................................................................................................66 Data Collection Procedures ........................................................................................73 Data Encoding ............................................................................................................73 5 RESULTS...................................................................................................................78 French Data.................................................................................................................78 Comprehension....................................................................................................78 Compositions.......................................................................................................79 Cloze test .............................................................................................................87 Summary of the results on French data ......................................................................92 Chinese Data...............................................................................................................92 Comprehension Task...........................................................................................92 Compositions.......................................................................................................95 Written Editing Task .........................................................................................104 Summary of the results of the Chinese data ......................................................107 6 DISCUSSION...........................................................................................................109 Research Question One.............................................................................................109 Answer to Question One ...................................................................................109 Comparisons with Previous Studies of French..................................................109 Research Question Two............................................................................................111 Answer to Question Two...................................................................................111 Comparisons with Previous Studies of Chinese................................................112 Research Question Three..........................................................................................113 Research Implications...............................................................................................121 Pedagogical Implications..........................................................................................125 French................................................................................................................125 Chinese ..............................................................................................................126 Limitations of the Present Study...............................................................................130 7 CONCLUSION.........................................................................................................132 APPENDIX A LANGUAGE BACKGROUND INFORMATION..................................................134 B FRENCH COMPREHENSION TASK ....................................................................136 C FRENCH CLOZE TEST ..........................................................................................138 v D CHINESE COMPREHENSION TASK...................................................................140 E CHINESE CLOZE TEST.........................................................................................142 F COMPOSITION TOPICS........................................................................................144 G OPERATIONAL TESTS..........................................................................................145 LIST OF REFERENCES.................................................................................................146 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...........................................................................................152 vi LIST OF TABLES Table page 2.1 Classification