Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Can completive and durative adverbials function as tests for telicity?
T2 - Evidence from English and Chinese
AU - Xiao, Richard
AU - McEnery, Tony
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - Telicity is an important concept in the study of aspect. While the compatibility tests with completive and durative adverbials have long been in operation as a diagnostic for telicity, their validity and reliability have rarely been questioned. This article critically explores the validity and reliability of such tests and discusses such temporal expressions in English and Chinese on the basis of written and spoken corpora of the two languages and proposes a scheme of usage categories of completive and durative adverbials with their respective proportions, which is adequately explanatory of the phenomena observed in attested language use and enables compatibility tests with completive and durative adverbials to achieve improved accuracy and reliability.
AB - Telicity is an important concept in the study of aspect. While the compatibility tests with completive and durative adverbials have long been in operation as a diagnostic for telicity, their validity and reliability have rarely been questioned. This article critically explores the validity and reliability of such tests and discusses such temporal expressions in English and Chinese on the basis of written and spoken corpora of the two languages and proposes a scheme of usage categories of completive and durative adverbials with their respective proportions, which is adequately explanatory of the phenomena observed in attested language use and enables compatibility tests with completive and durative adverbials to achieve improved accuracy and reliability.
KW - aspect
KW - telicity
KW - linguistic test
KW - corpus-based approach
KW - English
KW - Chinese
U2 - 10.1515/CLLT.2006.001
DO - 10.1515/CLLT.2006.001
M3 - Journal article
VL - 2
SP - 1
EP - 21
JO - Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory
JF - Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory
SN - 1613-7027
IS - 1
ER -