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The Korean Association for the Study of English Language and Linguistics
[ Article ]
Korea Journal of English Language and Linguistics - Vol. 22, No. 0, pp.998-1015
ISSN: 1598-1398 (Print) 2586-7474 (Online)
Print publication date 31 Jan 2022
Received 02 Sep 2022 Revised 20 Sep 2022 Accepted 30 Sep 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.15738/kjell.22..202210.998

The Order of Resistance to Stative Progressives and Thematic Roles

Junseon Hong
Graduate Student, Department of English Language and Literature, Seoul National University jshong512@snu.ac.kr


© 2022 KASELL All rights reserved
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons License, which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

This article aims to verify the order of resistance to stative progressives and offer a plausible account for the order. Though Vendler (1967) predicts that stative progressives are normally anomalous, numerous grammars and corpus-based analyses show that stative progressives do occur. Still, most of them are limited to mere predictions. Unlike previous works, this paper justifies the hierarchical resistance order of states to the progressive by consulting the data from the corpus. The empirical data prove that states are hierarchically ordered into four classes: perception, emotion, cognition, and relation. It is proposed that this order of resistance derives from the thematic role of a subject, especially an Experiencer. Since perception, emotion, and cognition states have an Experiencer as a subject that involves action, they are less resistant to the progressive than relation states. The interaction with states and thematic role also clarifies why perception stative progressives are most frequent among the three states with Experiencer. The physical activity involved with an Experiencer’s perception leads perception states to bear the strongest dynamicity and allows them to be more tolerant of the progressive.

Keywords:

states, progressive, dynamicity, resistance order, thematic role

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