Telicity tests: corpus evidence from Eng & Chinese

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Can completive and durative adverbials function as tests for telicity? Evidence form English and Chinese

(Manuscript)

Richard Xiao and Tony McEnery
Lancaster University

Telicity is one of the most important concepts in aspect study, which is related to the aspectual feature of whether a situation has an inherent, well-defined, natural final endpoint. The telicity value of a situation not only affects the interaction between situation aspect and viewpoint aspect, it influences the choice of viewpoint aspect in translation as well. While the compatibility tests with completive and durative adverbials have long been in operation as a diagnostic for determining the telicity value of a situation, the validity and reliability of such tests have rarely been questioned. This article discusses such temporal expressions in English and Chinese on the basis of written and spoken corpora of the two languages, with the aim of establishing a scheme of usage categories of completive and durative adverbials and their respective proportions using the quantitative data provided by corpora. The scheme proposed in this study is not only adequately explanatory of the phenomena observed in attested language use, it has also enabled compatibility tests with completive and durative adverbials to achieve improved accuracy and reliability in testing for the telicity value of a situation.

Keywords: aspect, telicity, linguistic test, corpus-based approach, English, Chinese

http://forum.corpus4u.org/upload/forum/2005110212444975.pdf
 
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