Estudi empíric sobre la semàntica verbal del català: el cas de la modalitat de l'acció [Empirical study of verbal semantics in Catalan: the case of 'Aktionsart']

This paper presents an empirical study on Catalan verbal semantics, more specifically on Aktionsart categories, based on real linguistic data from the "Corpus Textual Informatitzat de la Llengua Catalana" (CTILC, Catalan Computerized Textual Corpus). This work includes a large and varied set of verbal predicates, as well as grammatical constructions, with the primary purpose of providing empirical evidence that sheds light on one of the most prolific discussions in the literature on aspect: how and to what extent lexical semantics and syntax interact in the linguistic encoding of aspectual information. The data show that, although Aktionsart categories, when compared to each other, display different morphosyntactic usage patterns, the internal structuring of each category is not homogeneous; on the contrary, they present a gradient structuring, with prototypical members which do not accept aspectual shifting, and more flexible ones which may move towards other aspectual categories.