The L2 Acquisition of the Chinese Aspect Marking

By analyzing corpus data, we have shown that the tendencies of restricting perfective past marking to Accomplishments and Achievements and imperfective marking to Statives and Activities as described by the Aspect Hypothesis (Shirai, 1991; Andersen & Shirai, 1996), undesirable in the acquisition of various languages, are desirable in the acquisition of a language like Chinese, because these tendencies coincide with the natural occurrence patterns of –le and –zhe. We argue that different languages may observe the same natural language principle (Bybee’s Relevance Principle) in different ways, rendering the learner tendencies desirable or undesirable in the acquisition processes. Based on our new observations, we propose some modifications to the Aspect Hypothesis.