English Stative Verbs in Context of Aspectual Choice

This paper aims at identifying interrelationship between a semantic feature of stativity with verbal aspectual opposition progressive/non-progressive in English. Beside telicity and duration, stativity is one of the three distinctive semantic features and expresses the existance of some quality in time without investing any energy, therefore it represents situations without dynamic segments. The procedure of creating aspectual verbal possibilities in English is based both on semantic and syntactic grounds so this paper also applies selectional restrictions that stative verbs impose when choosing aspectual form. Therefore, this paper establishes and analyses the correlation between stativity and aspectual verbal opposition on the corpus excerpted from the modern English novel.