Abstract:

The purpose of our study is to investigate whether the English time adverbs still, already, and yet, motivate Japanese adult English learners to understand English aspect properly. English verbs perform differently in terms of aspect depending on which categories these verbs are part of. Vendler (1967) categorized English verbs into four types: activity verbs, stative verbs, achievement verbs, and accomplishment verbs. Activity verbs such as play and build do not have a starting point nor endpoint and indicate a change of state, therefore they can appear in progressive sentences. On the other hand, stative verbs such as like and know usually cannot appear in progressive forms as they show the continuation of a state. Achievement verbs, such as ‘reach,’ focus on the endpoint. Their progressive forms indicate ‘toward the end.’ Accomplishment verbs, such as ‘write a letter,’ focus on both the starting point and the endpoint. Cognitive linguistics (CL) links human cognition with language competence. It states a core image of each English preposition with a diagram, so that even exceptional cases can be beautifully explained. Regarding adverbs, a set of images to represent adverbs has not yet been established in CL. Based on the COCA corpus data, we analyzed English time adverbs, still, already, and yet (the Japanese language has only two time adverbs comparable to these three) and created a diagram of each English adverb.

We conducted elicited production tasks with Japanese university students in order to check how the contexts, which reflect the images of these adverbs, trigger target sentence including these adverbs as below.
(1) There is still disagreement about the best location.
(2) The proposed design was already out of fashion.
(3) I am not going to the bookstore yet.

We will prove that the new diagrams can help Japanese university students who are learning English as a second language understand English time adverbs as well as distinguish English aspects. We demonstrate that the cognitive images representing the relationship between aspects and adverbs will facilitate Japanese adult subjects’ correct judgment of English sentences with time adverbs and their acquisition of the English aspectual system.

References:
[1] Vendler, Zeno (1967). Linguistics in Philosophy, New York: Cornell University Press.

Keywords:

Cognitive Linguistic, English aspects, English time adverb.