Korean Speakers’ Sensitivity to Factors Linked to Grammatical Aspect in English

In English, telicity, transitivity, subject animacy, location information, and narrative introduction have been suggested to be linked to grammatical aspect. Interestingly, a connection between each of the factors and grammatical aspect is different in nature and in strength. The first three possess semantic connections, being linked to grammatical aspect, directly, indirectly, and through inference, respectively. The latter two are linked to the discourse function of grammatical aspect and as such, their links are weaker. The semantically motivated three factors are expected to have stronger influence on speakers’ aspectual choices. This paper examined Korean speakers’ sensitivity to these different connections and the hierarchy of predictive strength suggested. We found that Korean participants’ aspectual choices were primarily determined by semantically motivated factors (telicity and subject animacy) but there was a contribution from the discourse functions of location information as well.