International Journal of Chinese Linguistics 4:1 (2017), 1–21. doi 10.1075/ijchl.4.1.01li issn 2213–8706 / e-issn 2213–8714 © John Benjamins Publishing Company Chinese aspect marker -le and its acquisition by American English speakers Bin Li, 1 Hongli Fan 2 and Po-Lun Peppina Lee 1 1 City University of Hong Kong / 2 State University of New York Tis study investigates the functions of the perfective marker -le and its acquisi- tion by native speakers of American English from the perspective of the Aspect Hypothesis (Andersen and Shirai, 1994). We set out to test the predicted order regarding four verb categories in terms of their frequencies of -le marking. Our results confrmed that -le was most frequently used with achievement verbs by learners, but revealed deviated patterns of distribution in other categories when they were compared with those of native speakers of Chinese. We discussed our data further from the perspective of prototypicality, and provide pedagogical implications to Chinese as a foreign language. Keywords: aspect marker -le, acquisition of Chinese, the Aspect Hypothesis, verb category 1. Introduction In studies of tense-aspect morphology, it is crucial to distinguish two pairs of con- cepts: tense vs. aspect and grammatical aspect vs. lexical aspect. Tough both tense and aspect are represented by grammaticalized morphological means, tense lo- cates a situation on a time line (Comrie, 1985) while aspect, also called grammati- cal aspect, represents the internal temporal constituency of a situation. Diferent from grammatical aspect, lexical aspect refers to the inherent meaning encoded in lexical items that describe the situation. Tese lexical items are composed of verbs (or verb phrases) and are classifed according to their temporal properties into the following four categories: state verbs, activity verbs, accomplishment verbs or achievement verbs (Vendler 1957, 1967). Shirai and Andersen (1995, p. 744) give defnitions as the following: a) State verbs (STA) are verbs that have no dynamics, and continue without additional efort or energy being applied; b) Activity verbs (ACT) are verbs that are dynamic in nature, with no clear endpoint, and the phases