Second Language Learners’ Knowledge of Syntax in the Acquisition of Aspectual Semantics

Telicity (a type of aspectual semantics information) is a syntax-semantics interface property, its semantics standardly being analyzed as the product of syntactic operations. We aimed to find out whether second language learners‟ performance on the semantics of telicity would demonstrate sensitivity to the syntax underlying telicity calculation. Results of a sentence-rating experiment involving 36 L1 Chinese/L2 English learners and 16 native English speakers suggest that our L2ers may not have acquired the requisite syntactic knowledge for telicity interpretation.