L2 Acquisition of English present perfect semantic and pragmatic conditions

Abstract

This study investigates L2 acquisition of English present perfect by Greek Cypriot Greek speakers. One hundred Greek Cypriot university students took part in the study, the first part of which examined the sensitivity to grammatical norms (a passage correction task, based on Odlin et al. 2006), and the other part was focused on the production of English present perfect (elicitation of natural discourse, essays about personal experience). The results showed that L2 learners used more non-target tense forms (present simple and past simple) than the target present perfect in typical contexts, which is due to transfer from L1 Cypriot Greek (CG). The data only partially supports the Inherent Lexical Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai 1996; Bardovi-Harlig 1999), as L2 learners used perfective and past tense morphology with both punctual-telic predicates (achievements or accomplishments) and atelic or durative predicates (state or activity), though their production of target present perfect improves with more years of exposure to L2 English and there is a decrease in the use of stative and activity verbs with perfective and past tense marking.