The Effect of Process/Result Distinction on the Grammaticalization of Verbs

Tobin (1993) argues that verbs can be classified according to the process/result distinction. He further claims that the grammatical development of the lexical verbs into auxiliary/aspectual verbs is motivated by the distinction. In this paper, first, I reconsider Tobin's (1993) claim in the viewpoint of the principle of persistence (Hopper 1991) or the source determination hypothesis (Bybee, Perkins, and Pagliuca 1994), which states that the meaning of the source construction determines the path of grammaticalization. I then classified tense/aspect/ modality markers according to Tobin's (1993) process/result distinction. Finally, I argue that Tobin's (1993) process/result distinction constrains the distribution of grammaticalized verbs among tense/aspect/modality markers not only in English and but also in Korean.