Abstract:
This thesis is intended to investigate the process of acquisition of
Tense and Aspect Related to the Past in the written production of adult
learners of English. It is concerned with analysing this acquisitional
progression in form and meaning. It attempts to draw the map of the
emergence of tense and aspect morphology, then it evaluates the quality
of the learners mastery of the target temporal system. Finally, it goes
verifying the claims of the lexical aspect hypothesis pointing out the way
Lexical aspect influences the pattern of distribution of verbal
morphology throughout the evolutionary stages of the learner’s
morphological development.
The research was led through the analysis of the learners’ written
production over two years of study and data collection. It includes three
main parts. They are all involved under the incidental Form oriented
studies of tense and aspect related to the past. They represent three
different approaches to interlanguage analysis, so that the collection of
the three of them within one same research given a more complete vision
of the subject under study. The learners’ written production was analysed
through a longitudinal study, a cross-sectional study and an error analysis
study. The research involved the use of qualitative and quantitative
statistical means.
The results obtained highlight the steps of acquisition of verbal
morphology. They reveal that lexical aspect influences the distribution of
verbal morphology in initial and later stages of morphological develop-
ment through proficiency progression. They also show that the temporal - IV -
system is mastered quite adequately and when it is misused the errors are
more frequently of use than of form. They are mainly due to the inherent
complexity of the target language with some slight effect of the first
language.
On the basis of these findings, pedagogical advice and some
suggestions are presented to the grammar teachers of a foreign language.
