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Linguistic Approaches to Portuguese as an Additional Language
Edited by Karina Veronica Molsing, Cristina Becker Lopes Perna and Ana Maria Tramunt Ibaños
[Issues in Hispanic and Lusophone Linguistics 24] 2020
► pp. 109–148

The Lexical Aspect Hypothesis

Off-line evidence from Chinese learners of European Portuguese as an L2

| University of Saint Joseph
| University of Macau

This chapter investigates the acquisition of tense and aspect by Chinese learners of Portuguese as an L2 from a variationist perspective (Bayley, 2013). Difficulties in acquiring the aspectual contrasts set by the Perfect Preterit and Imperfect Preterit tenses in Romance languages have been widely documented (Blyth, 2005; Giacalone-Ramat, 2002; Kihlstedt, 2002; Martins, 2008). This study investigates the role of <lexical aspect> for the marking of Perfect and Imperfect Preterit following the tenets of the Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (LAH). It intends to design a different look into the LAH, as it considers other variables in interaction. Results show that lexical aspect plays a significant role in the learners’ use of inflectional morphology for both verb tenses, showing the dynamics of the interlanguage continuum.

Keywords: Aspect Hypothesis, SLA, L2 verbal morphology, Portuguese, Chinese
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • 1.The Lexical Aspect Hypothesis: Literature review
    • 1.1The Lexical Aspect Hypothesis: LAH
    • 1.2The Lexical Aspect Hypothesis in Romance languages
  • 2.Inflectional morphology
    • 2.1Variation
  • 3.The categories of tense and aspect in Portuguese and Chinese
    • 3.1Tense and aspect in Portuguese
    • 3.2Tense and aspect in Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese)
      • 3.2.1Cantonese
  • 4.Verb semantics: identification of verb properties
  • 5.The study: Methodological procedures
    • 5.1Introduction
    • 5.2Participants
    • 5.3Instruments of data collection
  • 6.Discussion of the results
    • 6.1Results for Perfect Preterit: Discussion
      • 6.1.1Lexical aspect
      • 6.1.2Length of exposure
    • 6.2Results for Imperfect Preterit
      • 6.2.1Grammatical aspect
      • 6.2.2Type of task
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 26 March 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ihll.24.05mar
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