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Analysis of patterns of past tense errors in a corpus of Singapore students’ narrative writing : insights on language acquisition
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Type
Thesis
Author
Quek, Sharon Yee Ser
Supervisor
Lubna Alsagoff
Teo, Peter
Abstract
This study investigates the acquisition of past tense by English learners in Singapore from the perspectives of lexical aspect and discourse grounding. Learners’ acquisition of past tense is examined at two levels: firstly, by investigating the interactions between lexical aspect (the inherent meaning of verbs) and grammatical aspect (expressed in past tense forms by morphological markers) in past tense acquisition. In other words, the study examines how learners pay attention to the inherent meanings of verbs when they learn to mark verbs morphologically in the past tense (Li and Shirai, 2000). Secondly, the interactions of the aspectual meanings of the verbs and discourse grounding have been investigated. The study examines how learners use emerging verbal morphology to distinguish between foreground (i.e. the part of the text that moves the narrative through time) and background (i.e. descriptive material that does not advance the plot) of a narrative (Bardovi-Harlig, 2002).
Two theories, namely Aspect Hypothesis (AH) and Discourse Hypothesis (DH), are tested to examine if semantic meanings of the verbs and discourse grounding can explain the acquisition of past tense markings in narrative writing. AH predicts that at the lower levels of language proficiency, learners’ past tense markings are initially restricted to telic verbs before atelic verbs. DH predicts that telic verbs will be marked more accurately in the foreground than background of narratives by learners. This study is one of the few studies in Singapore that attempt to bring the two hypotheses together to explain the acquisition of past tense.
Using a corpus-based approach, the past tense markings of 589 students from four grade levels (i.e. Primary 3, Primary 5, Secondary 1 and Secondary 3) were analysed using the UAM Corpus Tool. The findings of the study partially supported the predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis (AH). Unlike prototypical association with past tense markings (as predicted in AH), past tense markings with telic verbs were observed to be strengthened when learners’ language proficiency increased in this study. However, distributional patterns of tense-aspect past morphology by the English learners in this study showed more influence by discourse grounding where telic verbs were marked more accurately in the foreground than background of the narratives. Telicity stands out as the prominent aspectual meaning and interacts with both lexical aspect and the discourse grounding to attract more accurate past tense markings on telic verbs and in the foreground of the learners’ narratives. As a whole, the findings within this study emphasize the interactive influence of both aspectual meanings of the verb and discourse grounding as important linguistic factors to account for past tense acquisition of English learners in Singapore.
Two theories, namely Aspect Hypothesis (AH) and Discourse Hypothesis (DH), are tested to examine if semantic meanings of the verbs and discourse grounding can explain the acquisition of past tense markings in narrative writing. AH predicts that at the lower levels of language proficiency, learners’ past tense markings are initially restricted to telic verbs before atelic verbs. DH predicts that telic verbs will be marked more accurately in the foreground than background of narratives by learners. This study is one of the few studies in Singapore that attempt to bring the two hypotheses together to explain the acquisition of past tense.
Using a corpus-based approach, the past tense markings of 589 students from four grade levels (i.e. Primary 3, Primary 5, Secondary 1 and Secondary 3) were analysed using the UAM Corpus Tool. The findings of the study partially supported the predictions of the Aspect Hypothesis (AH). Unlike prototypical association with past tense markings (as predicted in AH), past tense markings with telic verbs were observed to be strengthened when learners’ language proficiency increased in this study. However, distributional patterns of tense-aspect past morphology by the English learners in this study showed more influence by discourse grounding where telic verbs were marked more accurately in the foreground than background of the narratives. Telicity stands out as the prominent aspectual meaning and interacts with both lexical aspect and the discourse grounding to attract more accurate past tense markings on telic verbs and in the foreground of the learners’ narratives. As a whole, the findings within this study emphasize the interactive influence of both aspectual meanings of the verb and discourse grounding as important linguistic factors to account for past tense acquisition of English learners in Singapore.
Date Issued
2017
Call Number
PE1301 Que
Date Submitted
2017