Effect Of Lexical Aspect Upon Distribution Of Grammatical Aspect Of Verbs

Lexical aspect is an important concept in English for the semantic features inherent in the lexical items(verbs) which describe the situation(Li & Shirai, 2000). Since the concept was put forward, many researchers have been focusing on the relevance between lexical aspect and temporality acquisition. As a result, the Aspect Hypothesis was put forward stating that “first and second language learners will initially be influenced by the inherent semantic aspect of verbs or predicates in the acquisition of tense and aspect markers associated with or affixed to these verbs”(Anderson & Shirai, 1994). Yet, the possible effect of lexical aspect upon the distribution of grammatical aspect of English verbs in native speakers’ use rather than in L2 learners’ acquisition has not been adequately studied.With the help of the British National Corpus(BNC), a 100-million-word collection of samples comprising both written and spoken language from a wide range of sources and representing a wide cross-section of British English in the late 20 th century, this study was designed to catch a glimpse of the distributive patterns of verbs belonging to different lexical aspects and find out how the semantic meanings of verbs may affect their grammatical distributions in native speakers’ written English use. Based on Vendler’s classification of verbs and verb phrases, three most frequently used words were sampled from each of the four categories of state verbs, activity verbs, accomplishment verbs, and achievement verbs, and examined for their distributions across the progressive aspect, perfective aspect, and simple aspect(verbs and verb phrases totally unmarked for the progressive and perfective aspect) in native speakers’ written English sub-corpus of the British National Corpus.The result shows that state verbs are most frequently used in the simple aspect by native English speakers. Activity verbs are evenly distributed among different grammatical aspects. Accomplishment verbs are more likely to be used in the perfective aspect. Achievement verbs are most frequently used in the perfective aspect.The result of the present study may hold important theoretical and pedagogical implications. Theoretically, it has verified the Aspect Hypothesis in native speakers’ English use and supports previous findings concerning the correlation between verbal morphology and lexical aspect. Pedagogically, the result suggests that knowledge of an English verb’s lexical aspect would help account for the verb’s use in the grammatical aspects so that more attention should be given to the lexical aspects of verbs in teaching and learning the use of the verbs’ grammatical aspects.