Second Language Acquisition of Progressive Aspect of Stative and Achievement Verbs in English Mohammad Falhasiri Department of English Language, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran Email: Falhasiri@yahoo.com Manijeh Youhanaee Department of English Language, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran Email: Youhanaee_m@hotmail.com Hossein Barati Department of English Language, University of Isfahan, Isfahan, Iran Email: H.barati@gmail.com Abstract—The progressive aspect in stative verbs, due to their semantic, and in achievement verbs, due to their occurrence at a single moment, is widely recognized as unacceptable and uncommon. This paper reports on the judgment of EFL learners of English as well as native speakers on compatibility of progressive aspect with these two verb categories. To the mentioned aim, 70 EFL learners of English, assigned to four groups of elementary, low intermediate, high intermediate and advanced learners, as well as 10 native speakers were chosen as the participants of the present study. A test of grammatically judgment of progressive form in state and achievement verbs in which the participants were given some sentences containing state and achievement verbs in progressive form along with some fillers was devised and the participants were asked to evaluate if they were grammatically acceptable or not. The results showed that the majority of native speakers judged progressive use in both state and achievement verbs as acceptable while advanced learners, with a wide margin, considered progressive forms unacceptable. When the results of all groups were analyzed, it was concluded that the higher the level of participants was, the more they accepted the progressive form as unacceptable. Index Terms— state verb, achievement verb, aspect, progressive aspect I. INTRODUCTION A. Tense and Aspect Comrie (1976) differentiates between tense and aspect explaining that "Tense relates the moment of the situation in relation to some other time, usually to the moment of speaking." Three kinds of tense (i.e., past, present and future) are commonly observed in most languages. Aspect, however, is the way events evolve in time i.e., whether or not an event is ongoing or has reached the culminating point (Comrie, 1976; Chung & Timberlake, 1985; Smith, 1991). Gabriel (2005) states that Zeno Vendler (1967) was the first person who tried to establish four distinct categories of English verbs according to aspectual differences with regard to their restrictions on time adverbials, tenses, and logical entailments (Dowty, 1979). Situation aspect (aspect in verbs/ verb phrases) classifies verbs and verb predicates into four classes based on their semantic properties: states, activities, accomplishments and achievements. States (or statives) are homogeneous and static and have no internal structure which changes over time. Activities are homogeneous, ongoing, dynamic situations with no inherent goal (i.e., atelic). Accomplishments involve an activity which progresses towards an inherent culmination point in time, after which the event can no longer continue (i.e., telic). Achievements have an inherent culmination point, in which the duration of time leading up to this point is instantaneous (i.e., telic). Dowty (1979) further defined Vendler's classification and therefore, the classification of verbs is also known as the Vendler-Dowty classification. Each verb class has internal characteristics helping us differentiate verbs and categorize them into different classifications. These internal characteristics are indicated by contrasting features: [+/- static], [+/- telic] and [+/- duration] (Smith, 1991). Table 1 shows the schematized situation types categorized by these three features. ISSN 1798-4769 Journal of Language Teaching and Research, Vol. 3, No. 5, pp. 992-1003, September 2012 © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER Manufactured in Finland. doi:10.4304/jltr.3.5.992-1003 © 2012 ACADEMY PUBLISHER