The Aspect Hypothesis, the comparative fallacy and the validity of obligatory context analysis: a reply to Lardiere, 2003

Abstract

Lardiere (2003), in her reply to Lakshmanan and Selinker (2001), justifies the use of suppliance in obligatory contexts as a method of analysis in the investigation of the second language (L2) acquisition of past tense, and claims that such a method is characteristic of previous studies that have proposed the Aspect Hypothesis. It is argued here that this is a misrepresentation of research on the Aspect Hypothesis which, contra Lardiere, takes seriously the problem of the ‘comparative fallacy’ and the autonomous nature of interlanguage. Lardiere also argues that the Aspect Hypothesis studies suffer from a different kind of comparative fallacy, to which I reply by discussing the importance of refining methods of analysis in verb aspectual classification of learner data.