An empirical approach to Aktionsart: A corpus-based study

This paper presents a comprehensive study on Aktionsart based on Spanish data extracted from corpora. This work includes a large and diverse set of verbal predicates as well as grammatical constructions, with the primary purpose of providing empirical evidence on one of the most prolific topics in the theoretical approaches to lexical semantics. In particular, the main goal of this paper is twofold: firstly, to identify different restrictions in the interaction of 'verb + grammatical construction' depending on the aspectual category of the verb; and secondly, to describe how these categories are internally structured. The results clearly show that the different Aktionsart categories use different morphosyntactic patterns. Moreover, it is demonstrated that these categories, far from being structured from necessary and sufficient conditions, present a gradual internal structure, with prototypical verbs which do not accept aspectual shifting and more flexible verbs which can be adapted to other categories.