Abstract
The present study explores how three factors (Japanese language proficiency, grammatical aspect, and lexical aspect) influence the acquisition of the Japanese imperfective aspect marker -teiru by Taiwanese learners of Japanese. The study is based on multivariate analyses of examples from the Corpus of Taiwanese Learner of Japanese (CTLJ). The results of the classification tree analysis of Japanese compositions written by 40 Taiwanese learners during the course of two years showed that the multiple meanings of the Japanese imperfective aspect marker –teiru had a stronger effect than the lexical aspect of Japanese verbs on the use of –teiru, and the learners’ Japanese language proficiency was the weakest factor that influenced the acquisition of –teiru.
