Complexity of the English present perfect: A comparative study between the English present perfect and the Mandarin guo and le.

摘要

The purpose of this study is to examine the complexity of the English present perfect and how the Chinese EFL students use this grammatical form. The semantic features for the English present perfect were compared with those for the CRS le and the experiential guo in Mandarin in order to see whether the efforts made by the Chinese EFL students resulted from the difficulties of the English present perfect, from the CRS le and the experiential marker guo, or from both.;Two groups of subjects, 96 Chinese EFL students and 37 English native speakers, were asked to take a multiple-choice test. The 96 Chinese EFL students who spoke Mandarin at home as their first language were asked to produce, in addition to the multiple-choice test, English and Chinese writing samples, to answer a contrastive-translation test, to describe temporal concepts in a concept-verbalization test, and to reflect their opinions in a questionnaire. Three evaluators were selected to evaluate the present perfect sentences appearing in the English writing samples and provide "ideal answers" for the multiple-choice test to see whether the native-speaker group differed from the EFL group in matching their responses to the evaluators' "ideal answers.";The results indicate, first, that the native speakers were more homogeneous than the Chinese EFL subjects in selecting the most favorable answers for a certain statement. Second, the native speakers had significantly higher percentages in selecting the perfect answers suggested by the three evaluators than the Chinese EFL students. Third, the error types made by the EFL students systematically reflected their failure in applying the semantic features of the English present perfect accurately. After comparing the English writing samples and the Chinese ones, it was found that the role of the CRS le and the experiential guo, and that of other adverbial phrases like cengjing 'ever,' also accounted for the error types of the English present perfect in that Mandarin and English have different constraints in expressing current relevance. Finally, the semantic features defined for the English present perfect and for the CRS le and the experiential marker guo in Mandarin serve as a useful means for EFL instruction.