A corpus-based study of the acquisition of the English progressive by L1 Chinese learners: From prototypical activities to marked statives

This article investigates how EFL learners’ progressive markings are influenced by the lexical aspect of verbs, modality (spoken vs. written), and proficiency levels, focusing on the controversial issue of stative verbs in progressives in L2 acquisition. Spoken (SECCL) and written (WECCL) corpus data from two proficiency levels of Chinese EFL learners and comparison data from native English speakers (COCA) were analyzed. The results suggest that in both learner and native data the progressive -ing is strongly associated with activity verbs, stative verbs being least likely to be inflected with the progressive, as predicted by the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai 1994, 1996). However, inconsistently with the Aspect Hypothesis, this association strengthens with higher proficiency levels. Learners’ use of stative verbs in the progressive and the overextended use of stative progressives was also found to be related to spoken vs. written mode of production and proficiency levels, with learners retreating from overextension as their proficiency increases. A usage-based account of the findings is proposed.