A Comparison Between English And Chinese Semelfactive Verbs From The Perspective Of Aspect

This study aims to study semelfactive verbs from the perspective of aspect,and finds out the similarities and differences between English and Chinese semelfactive verbs.The term "semelfactive" comes from the Latin semel(which means once),used in Slavic linguistics to refer to a suffix which indicates a single event.A series of aspect theories are mentioned in this thesis,among which,Vendler's theory is the most classic one since he gives a full description about verbal predicates,giving inspirations to the forthcoming scholars.Smith is one of them,and she claims that semelfactive verbs,describing actions that occur quickly and disappear within short time.To a certain extent,they are taken as a special atelic subclass of achievement,and sometimes are thought to be homonymous with activities.Five pairs of English and Chinese semelfactive words are chosen,that is,blink/?(?),cough/?(?),flash/?,knock/? and nod/?(...)?,and they are retrieved respectively in the BCC(BLCU Corpus Center)and COCA(Corpus of Contemporary American English),aiming to solve these two problems:(1)What are the similarities and differences between English and Chinese semelfactive verbs as to their syntactic forms?(2)What are the similarities and differences between aspect of English and Chinese semelfactive verbs when they are combined with different tense-aspect structures?By virtue of the data and analysis,the study finds out that:(1)There is indeed an interaction between aspect feature of semelfactive verbs and frequency adverbials.Frequency adverbials that have durative feature may influence aspect features of the verb constellation.As to syntactic structure,they are usually active voice,since most English semelfactive verbs are used as intransitive verbs and their subjects are the doer of the action,and the subjects of Chinese semelfactive verbs are human,which assert the dominance in the action.(2)Chinese and English semelfactive verbs have different percentages in aspect.For English semelfactive verbs,perfective is more than unmarked aspectuality,the latter being more than imperfective.Semelfactive verbs',features and simple past tense contribute to the high frequency of perfective.As to Chinese semelfactive verbs,neural aspect is the most common one and the other two aspects vary according to different verbs,since it is very natural for Chinese to speak a sentence without using aspect markers.There are five chapters in this thesis:chapter one gives a brief introduction about the research background and its objectivity and significance;chapter two shows a detailed description about the theory of aspect;chapter three explains how the author designs this research;chapter four presents the results and analyses and chapter five makes a summary of the whole thesis and points out the implications and limitations of this research.