A Contrastive Study Of English And Chinese Simple Accomplishment Sentences

Semantics is generally divided into lexical semantics and sentence semantics. Earlier approach to situation types was confined in the scope of lexical semantics. Traditionally, what is identified as aspect was subsumed under the term "tense"; aspect is viewed as a grammatical unit and is often confused with tense. Though tense is indeed a pure grammatical unit, aspect is now considered both a grammatical and semantic phenomenon. Aspectology includes viewpoint aspect and situation aspect. Viewpoint aspect provides a sentence with a temporal perspective; situation aspect presents a situation as belonging to a certain category of event or state. Situation aspect is now considered to be a phenomenon at the sentence level. By applying the Principle of compositionality, the study of word (verb) meaning and that of sentence meaning unify, which to some extent widens the way to the final solution of sentence meaning.This study presents a contrastive description of English and Chinese simple accomplishment sentences. The aim is to verify the adequacy of the quinquepartition of verbs with the hope to find similarities and differences between the two languages with reference to temporality. Following the two-component theory, the study develops the contrast from four angles: distribution, co-occurrence with durative temporal adverbials, interactions between accomplishment sentences and viewpoints, and boundedness. The result shows that the quinquepartition of states, activities, accomplishments, achievements, and semelfactives is adequate for the semantic description of temporal features inherent in sentences.Language universals is now a major concern in modern linguistics. Though the paper is only a contrast across two languages, the findings will no doubt contribute to some extent to the study of universals in that this study complies with the functional-typological approach.