On the Resultative Reading of the Imperfective Aspect in English

Smith and her followers assume that the imperfective markers in several languages can focus on the resultant stage of a situation depicted by a certain class of verbs and yield the so-called resultative reading. This paper tries to prove that the English imperfective marker is fundamentally different from, for example, the imperfective marker -te-iru in Japanese. The difference is that while the Japanese imperfective marker does focus on the resultant stage by triggering the resultant state reading, the English imperfective marker does not have such a function. In English, the seeming result meaning arises only from the cause-effect connection between the state depicted by the imperfective sentence and the situation which brings about that state. The imperfective marker has nothing to do with that meaning. This leads to the conclusion that the English imperfective aspect can focus only on the preliminary reading and the internal reading.