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

As a special kind of change-of-state verbs,degree achievement verbs can express the change of state like other achievements,but can be used together with durational adverbs.They generally consist of accomplishment verbs and activity verbs instead of achievements.On account of their distinctiveness in aspect,this thesis makes a contrastive analysis of English and Chinese degree achievement verbs from the perspective of aspect.On the basis of former research,Comrie(1976)highly generalizes three binary aspectual features,punctual vs.durative,telic vs.atelic and stative vs.dynamic.Whether the different telicity of degree achievement verbs at lexical level makes impact on the adverbs co-occurring with them in sentences is the first question for this thesis.In addition,former studies show that influenced by many factors,the aspectual features of degree achievement verbs,especially their telicity,are variable at sentence level.Whether this variability and the selection of grammatical aspect have relation with the telicity at lexical level is the second question of this thesis.Based on the above two questions,this thesis selects three pairs of telic and atelic degree achievement verbs in both English and Chinese,including straighten/??(??),empty/??,flatten/??;lengthen/??(??),shorten/??,widen/??,retrieving them from COCA and BCC and then make a contrastive analysis.The research shows that the adverbs modifying degree achievement verbs are influenced by the telicity of these verbs.For example,the adverb "completely" can only be used together with telic degree achievement verbs.The aspectual features of these verbs in sentences can also be affected by their telicity at lexical level but it is not the only factor.There is no significant difference between telic and atelic degree achievement verbs in both English and Chinese in the choice of grammatical aspects.There are five chapters of this thesis.The first chapter is the research background;The second chapter is the research review about aspect and degree achievement verbs;The third chapter introduces the study framework and the methodology;The fourth chapter shows the data analysis and discussion;The fifth chapter presents the conclusion including the main research findings,limitations and implications of the study.