At this week’s MCQLL meeting, Laurestine Bradford will present a talk titled “Do aspectual classes show up in corpus distribution patterns?”. We will be meeting this Wednesday, March 19, at 10 AM. Meetings are held in person in room 117 of the McGill Linguistics department and on zoom at https://mcgill.zoom.us/j/89609376104.
Verbs fall into distinct aspectual classes, as supported by a wide array of linguistic judgment tests. I expect strong grammaticality and felicity judgments to be correlated with widespread tendencies in usage which will be discoverable from a corpus. I present my plans to investigate whether the empirical distribution of verbs in an English corpus reflects their aspectual classification, or something else related. I will describe the broad patterns in my corpus data and the modeling approaches that I hope will bring to light additional patterns.