Lexicalisation of aspectual structures in English and Japanese Yasuhiro Shirai and Yumiko Nishi 1. Introduction yxwvutsrqponmlkihgfedcbaVTSJIHFEBA Inherent aspect categories of Achievements, Accomplishments, Ac- tivities, and States (Vendler 1957), and the semantic features that de- fine these categories (stativity, telicity, and punctuality) have been so central in the study of aspect that it is impossible to discuss aspectual phenomena without reference to them (e.g. Smith 1997, Terrny 1994). Although the universality of these semantic categories has been emphasised in the linguistic literature, not much attention has been paid to the crosslinguistic differences in how these aspectual notions are lexicalised across languages. In this paper, we make a first systematic attempt to investigate the crosslinguistic variation by conducting a case study comparing English and Japanese to explore how aspectual notions are lexicalised in these languages. This crosslinguistic variation also has important implications in the acqui- sition of tense/aspect morphology among second language learners, which so far has been completely neglected in this area (e.g. Ander- sen and Shirai 1996; Bardovi-Harlig 2000). The paper is organised as follows. First, we define four inherent aspectual classes of verbs, which is the basis of the current study. Second, we briefly discuss the correspondence patterns between Japanese and English in terms of how the same concept is expressed in these two languages, and propose the hypothesis that stativity is differently expressed across languages, whereas Activities are simi- larly lexicalised crosslinguistically. In the next section, we report on a study which tested the hypothesis based on an analysis of 100 most frequent verbs in English and Japanese, and we argue that the hy- Copyright © 2003. De Gruyter Mouton. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 4/20/2017 9:27 AM via CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIV AN: 558676 ; Giacalone Ramat, Anna.; Typology and Second Language Acquisition Account: s8481523