TIC como apoyo

The stop + ing construction usually appears with activity verbs. Table 1) illustrates

the occurrences of eventuality types within the stop + ing construction (the first ten

occurrences). As the table shows, stop + ing mostly takes activity verbs with an

acting agent. Besides activites, stop also takes accomplishments as its complement.

If stop appears with accomplishments, it leads to different entailment relations

from the entailment in the case of activity verbs. That is, while (41) with the activity verb ‘walk’ implies that John did walk, (42) with the accomplishment phrase ‘paint the picture’ does not imply that John painted the picture (Dowty 1979).

(41) John stopped walking.

(42) John stopped painting the picture. (Dowty: 57)

‘Stop+ing’ (1431) ‘Stopped +ing’ (1049) ‘Quit + ing’ (37)

Talk (100) Talk (78) Smoke (6) Use (64) Be (67) Play (3) Work (60) Work (51) Drink (3) Play (57) Speak (50) Booze (2) Think (50) Breathe (49) Act (2) Laugh (46) Cry (47) Call (2)

171

Try (41) Play (38) Talk (2) Look (39) Go (34) Try (20 Take (38) Take (32) Trip (1) Make (36) Smoke (30) Train (1)

Table 1. The most frequent eventuality types within the stop + ing construction and stopped + ing and quit + ing construction. Data based on findings from BNC

The appearance of the other eventuality types, states and achievements is more restricted within the stop + ing construction. This is especially true for

achievement verbs due to the instantaneous character of achievements; no single occurrence of achievement has been found within the stop + ing construction in the

ICAME (Brown, Frown, Flob, Lob) corpora and BNC (consider also the ungrammaticality of (43)). When achievements do appear as complements of stop

they tend to be recategorized as series (44).

(43) *His students stopped realizing what he meant.

(44) As Chou’s health deteriorated he stopped recognizing people.

(Freed: 115)

Concerning the occurrence of state verbs in the stop + ing construction, there have

been several state verbs found in this construction (ICAME findings and BNC). The findings for the stop + ing construction contain such state verbs as ‘love’

(stopped loving -21 entries) ‘have’ (stop having - 20 entries) ‘feel’ (stopped feeling

- 7 entries) (example of stop loving and stop having- (45-46)).

(45) Fortunately for us readers, Dennis has never stopped loving climbing. His second venture into self-mythography is every bit as entertaining as the first, and has the added spice of political and personal deep texture. Mountain Lover is one of the most intriguing (in several senses of the word) books I've read about the

global climbing village. (BNC)

(46) He points out that in 1960, married black women could have expected to have 3.49 children; if they had continued to reproduce at this rate, the out-of-wedlock rate among black women would have increased from 23% in 1960 to just 29% in

172

1987, and gone almost unnoticed. Instead, black married women stopped having so

many children. (BNC)

Often, when complements of stop are state verbs they tend to be recategorized as

activities (47-48):

(47) Marjorie, you must stop seeing things in terms of --; like a play! Such subtleties are hardly within her grasp. She was selected most carefully, you know. Most carefully indeed. She has a job to do, and she's doing it quite well. And that's

as far as it goes. (BNC)

(48) Telling himself to stop being stupid, he settled back and concentrated instead on his fellow passenger. In the opposite corner was a portly man in a baggy tweed suit. His shiny brown shoes had fine cracks in them, like an old oil painting, and the expanse of leg showing above the left sock was pale and hairless.

(BNC)

As distinct from stop + ing, the quit + ing construction rarely appears with state

verbs. The only example of quit + ing containing a state verb is the fragment

below, found in BNC:

(49) Cher ignored Sonny's attempt to apologise for their years of bickering. Sonny, who is mayor of Palm Springs in California, said: "I shouted out to her but she walked past without even looking."I think you could consider that a brush off." The battling couple have frequently traded insults in books and through magazine interviews. Sonny said: "She has to quit living in the past’. (BNC)

The quit + ing construction does not appear with achievement verbs either;

similarly to the case of stop + ing achievement verbs can appear as part of the quit + ing construction only when they are recategorized as series (50-51).

The most frequent occurrence of quit + ing construction is also with activities (52).

As table 1) shows the most frequent event types within this construction are activity verbs with an acting agent.

173

(50) *His students quit realizing what he meant. (Freed: 115) (51) John M& Dalton, himself a lawyer and a man of long service in government, spoke with rich background and experience when he said in an address here that lawyers ought to quit sitting in the Missouri General Assembly, or quit accepting fees from individuals and corporations who have controversies with or axes to grind with the government and who are retained, not because of their legal talents, but because of their government influence. (BNC)

(52) Sometimes I wish we could just get out of here, you know. Start again somewhere else. I might quit teaching. (FROWN)

There seems to be a slight difference between stop + ing and quit + ing when they

appear with activities. Thus, while quit + ing tends to express the cessation of a

habitual activity (the most frequent verbs are smoking, drinking, boozing etc.) stop + ing rather expresses the end of a single ongoing occurrence (activity).

In conclusion, it can be said that although very close in meaning, the two constructions are slightly different - also shown by the subtle differences in their syntactic distribution (their appearance with event types). The difference between the two constructions lies mainly in the presence vs. lack of intentionality, permanent vs. temporary cessation and also habituality.

174