Abstract:

Omission of BE is a common interlanguage phenomenon. Through an in-depth analysis of the data from Hong Kong Baptist University Interlanguage Corpus and Chinese Learner English Corpus, this study found that omission of BE frequently occurs before stage-level phrases, namely, phrases expressing temporary and dynamic meanings, and this tendency shows a sign of fossilization in many Chinese-English interlanguage grammars. Grammaticality judgment test further testified the corpus-based result that omission of BE is sensitive to semantics of copular predicative. To account for this phenomenon, the author of this paper proposed an interlanguage rule, BE/_[+Asp], which states that learners tend to omit the English verb BE before aspectual phrases. It has been argued that the formulation and internalization of such a rule in learners’ mental grammars is closely related to the Aspect Hypothesis, reflecting a universal mechanism in the acquisition of the English tense-aspect system, that is, the primacy of aspect over tense.