Perfect Aspect in Advanced EFL Learners' Interlanguage

• Main Authors: Yang,Yu Ting, 楊宇婷
• Other Authors: 黃瓊之
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/32473289938029266323

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 語言研究所 === 95 === This study aims to explore the advanced learners’ use of the perfect aspect from the perspectives of form-meaning matching, lexical aspect influence and discourse organization influence. Thirty-two English-majored graduate students participated in the present study and they had to complete two tasks: a cloze test and a composition. With a careful examination over the collected data, these advanced learners’ use of the perfect aspect could be summarized as the following. First of all, they showed better formal accuracy than appropriate use of the perfect aspect. Although they presented more underuse in the task of cloze, they had more overuse in their compositions. Secondly, it was found that the perfect aspect was closely related to the verbs involving a semantic endpoint. These verbs, according to Vendler’s classification, are ACCOMPLISHMENTS and ACHIEVEMENTS. Finally, the learners in the present study showed a tendency of using the perfect aspect as the scene-setting function in the opening paragraph of their compositions.