A Corpus-based Study Of Grammatical Aspect Of English Punctual Verbs

English punctual verb,according to the definition from Cmorie,is a kind of verbs used to show the instantaneous occurrence of the situation,highlighting the feature of punctuality.Comrie points out that punctuality legitimizes the existence of punctual verbs,but there is a special case: a kind of punctual verbs that can represent either a single action or a series of actions.For example,cough can not only mean "a single cough" as an instantaneous action,but also " a series of coughs" in iterative form.The situation taking place once and once only,or repeating,will make a whole difference.To distinguish this particular case,Comrie uses the term "semelfactive" to refer to such a situation.Punctual verbs are frequently used in English,but there is little research on them.One of the reasons is that English punctual verb cannot be classified as a single class of verbs such as activity verbs and achievement verbs,because its aspectual feature can be applied to a wide range of verbs.In order to solve this problem,the range of punctual verbs should be clear.Based on previous studies(Comrie’s dichotomy on the meaning of aspectual features,Vendler’s division of lexical aspect,Smith’s division of situation types,etc.),It is found that English punctual verbs actually include achievement verbs and semelfactive verbs.Then,are there any differences between the two kinds of verbs when both they are compatible with punctuality? To provide a more concrete answer,this study relies on the grammatical aspect(perfective aspect and progressive aspect)to conduct an internal contrastive study on English punctual verbs.It aims to solve the following questions :(1)Does any difference exist in the use of English punctual verbs(achievement verbs and semelfactive verbs)in different grammatical aspect?(2)If it does,what is the difference? What factors account for these differences?The corpus of this study is taken from the American Contemporary English Corpus(COCA),and five achievement verbs(join,crash,arrive,die,disappear)and five semelfactive verbs(cough,sneeze,flash,smash,kick)are selected.By comparing the use of the two types of verbs in perfective aspect and progressive aspect,we find that:(1)There are significant differences between achievement verbs and semelfactive verbs in the use of grammatical aspect,though both of them belong to punctual verbs.(2)The differences are as following: as a whole,the frequency of semelfactive verbs is significantly higher than that of achievement verbs in both perfective and progressive aspect.Speaking in details,in the perfective aspect,the semelfactive verbs are more sensitive to the simple past tense,while the achievement verbs are more compatible with the present and past perfect tense.As for the progressive aspect,the continuous tense is more used in semelfactive verbs than achievement verbs.The differences are caused by two factors.One is the semantic interaction of aspect features in lexical aspect,and the other is aspectual coercion in grammatical aspect.The discovery of the two factors not only explains the internal differences of English punctual verbs,but also further verifies the interaction between lexical and grammatical aspect.