Telicity

There are languages – e.g., German, Inuktitut, and Russian –
in which the aspectual reference of clauses depends on the telicity of their
event predicates. We argue that in such languages, clauses or verb phrases
not overtly marked for viewpoint aspect implicate or entail ‘event
realization’, a property akin to Parsons’s (1990) ‘culmination’. The
aspectual reference associated with the use of clauses not overtly marked for
aspect is computed in accordance with the dependence of realization
conditions on telicity and in line with principles of Gricean pragmatics. We
formalize event realization and capture the telicity-dependent patterns of
aspectual reference on which it is based by combining Krifka’s (1989, 1992,
1998) event lattices with a model-theoretic interpretation of Klein’s (1994)
theory of tense and aspect. The latter permits us to treat the ‘topic times’ of
aspectual operators as temporal constraints on event realization.

English aspectual particles in phrasal verbs have been since Brinton (1985) commonly treated as markers of telicity, i.e. markers of an inherent endpoint of events, e.g. eat (atelic) – eat up (telic). The present paper tests this assumption on 100 aspectual phrasal verbs with ten different particles. Minimal pairs of sentences with and without particles have been created and tested by two of Dowty’s (1979) aspectual tests. For these tests acceptability judgments have been elicited from native speakers. The paper points out methodological problems which should be taken into consideration in any study that relies on eliciting acceptability judgments. Most importantly, the results of the present study suggest, contra what is standardly assumed, that aspectual particles are not primarily markers of telicity. Instead, particles contribute other aspectual and non-aspectual meanings.

This paper examines the temporal semantic properties of English phrasal verbs with the particles down, off and up in the progressive aspect. The analysis includes testing of telicity, dynamicity and stativity components of meaning. The paper also enquires the influence of verb arguments on the change of aktionsart category as well as the commonest denotation of particles as they appear in the corpus examples. The results show that phrasal verbs, whose particles add to the meaning of telicity, become neutral towards this parameter when in the progressive, i.e., the particle acts as an additional aspectual marker in verbs that are inherently telic.

What are linguistic features, and how do they manifest themselves in natural languages? The Georgian language provides a particularly acute set of challenges to linguists in the way it questions received assumptions about grammatical functions, thematic relations, and natural language categorization. 

This dissertation tackles these facts by examining first what the evidence for different domains of grammar are in Georgian. How do data from Georgian verb morphology challenge traditional assumptions underlying lexical incremental assumptions behind the morpheme? Do inversion facts argue for monostratal or multistratal conceptualizations of grammatical functions?

The answer to both of these questions is highly complicated, and requires an extensive look at the Georgian systems of case, agreement, tense, aspect, and modality.  In particular I assess the viability of classical treatments such as Harris (1982), Anderson (1993), Marantz (1992), and Stump (2001) and find that Georgian poses problems for each one.  I go on to assess in the second part how differential feature hierarchies in morphology versus syntax argue for the existence of distinct feature geometries.  Feature hierarchies, it turns out, are epiphenomena of set-theoretical properties of these geometries.  In the last chapter, I discuss the literature on feature hierarchies arguing how many scholars have misunderstood this highly abstract area of grammatical theorizing.

Cross-linguistically, researchers have found a distributional bias of tense/aspect markers in child languages, namely, children initially use past or perfective morphology with telic predicates and use present or progressive morphology with atelic predicates. One attempt to explain this phenomenon is the Prototype Account, which argues that children acquire a linguistic category starting with the prototype of the category and later extend its application to less prototypical cases . Based on the English data, they argue that children do not distinguish between past/perfective and telicity, which is the prototype for category past and category perfective. * I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my thesis advisor, Prof. Cristina Schmitt, for comments and discussions on an earlier version of this paper. I thank the three anonymous reviewers and the managing editor for comments. I am also grateful for the research participants and their family. Any remaining mistakes are solely mine.

ncremental theme verbs such as eat, drink, write or read are well known for the fact that the referential properties of the incremental theme argument a ect the referential properties, i. e., telicity, of the predication (e. g. Krifka 1986, 1998 among others). If the incremental theme argument has quantized 1 reference, as for example in the case of a singular count noun such as apple, the whole predication is telic (1a). If the incremental theme argument has cumulative reference, which is the case for bare plurals (apples) and mass nouns (soup), the whole predication is atelic (1b, c). The contrast in telicity is indicated by the interpretation of the time-span adverbial in ten minutes. Only (1a) allows for the relevant telic interpretation in which the time-adverbial indicates the time after which the process of eating is nished. Such an interpretation is not possible with (b) and (c) since neither apples nor soup indicate a speci ed quantity that introduces a natural endpoint of the event.

The theory of situation-type aspect based on scales (e.g. Tenny 1994; Jackendoff 1996; Rappaport Hovav 2008; Rappaport Hovav and Levin 2010) is applied in the present study to aspectual English verb particles and Slovak verbal prefixes. I argue that both particles and prefixes come in two types, non-scalar and scalar, depending on how they describe the change denoted in the verb root. Non-scalar particles and prefixes do not alter argument structure, e.g. The children walked (on) in silence. They appear in predicates without an underlying scale, which are consequently atelic. In contrast, scalar particles and prefixes appear in predicates with an underlying scale, which are potentially telic. Scalar prefixes and particles can alter argument structure because scales require an obligatory realization of the measured participant, e.g. Ally slept *(off) a headache. The study reviews manifestations of argument-structure alternations as well as factors that determine the effect of particles and prefixes on telicity.

Event structure describes the relationships between general semantics (Aktionsart) of the verb and its syntactic properties, separating verbs into two classes: telic verbs, which denote change of state events with an inherent end-point or boundary (catch, rescue), and atelic, which refer to homogenous activities (tease, host). As telic verbs describe events, in which the internal argument (Patient) is affected, we hypothesized that processing of telic verb template would activate syntactic position of the Patient during sentence comprehension. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded from 20 English speakers, who read sentences with reduced Object relative clauses, in which the verb was either telic or atelic. ERPs in relative clauses diverged on the definite article preceding the Agent: the atelic condition was characterized by larger amplitude negativity at the N100. Such processing differences are explained by activation of the syntactic position for the Patient by the event structure template of telic verbs.

This paper presents a brief contrastive study of Serbian translation equivalents of telic situations (accomplishments and achievements) used in imperfective verbal aspect in English language. The aim is to examine to what extent the differences in the use of imperfective verbal aspect between these two languages allow retention of distinctive semantic feature [+ telicity] and the language manner to acheve this. Moreover, we shall analyze how the imperfective aspect affects the semantic feature [+/-duration], which distinguishes accomplishments from achievements. The corpus of this research is the novel A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and its translation to Serbian (Paklena pomorandža). Corpus analysis is synchronous contrastive analysis of telic situations used in Past Progressive, Present Progressive and Present Perfect Progressive (the total of 100 sentences) and their translation equivalents in Serbian.

Unlike what is the case for physical entities and other types of continuants, few process ontologies exist. This is not only because processes received less attention in the research community, but also because classifying them is challenging. Moreover, upper level categories or classification criteria to help in modelling and integrating lower level process ontologies have thus far not been developed or widely adopted. This paper proposes a basis for further classifying processes in the Basic Formal Ontology. The work is inspired by the aspectual characteristics of verbs such as homeomericity, cumulativity, telicity, atomicity, instantaneity and durativity. But whereas these characteristics have been proposed by linguists and philosophers of language from a linguistic perspective with a focus on how matters are described, our focus is on what is the case in reality thus providing an ontological perspective. This was achieved by first investigating the applicability of these characteristics to the top-level processes in the Gene Ontology, and then, where possible, deriving from the linguistic perspective relationships that are faithful to the ontological principles adhered to by the Basic Formal Ontology.

The paper focuses on the selection of the reflexive particle in Slavic unaccusative verbs. Based on Levin and Rappaport's Causative Analysis of Unaccusative Verbs, the author shows that Polish and other Slavic languages divide many of their unaccusative into two groups which behave differently with respect to the reflexive particle. By showing different alternation patterns for these verbs, the author points out limitations of the Causative Analysis. Finally, the paper attempts to explain how causation is represented in the morphology of change of state verbs and how it further licenses or blocks the reflexive particle in these verbs.

In the literature it is argued that distributional semantics can provide a comprehensive model of lexical meaning. The present paper challenges this assumption and argues that the issue of semantic similarity cannot be fully addressed unless the denotation of terms is systematically examined, since the distributional approach on its own lacks the methodological and conceptual resources to pursue this task. The present proposal is an approach in which distributional semantics meets event semantics. Through an analysis of the verbs of creation it is demonstrated that shared distributional properties are not indicative of shared denotations. In other words, the data shows that the former can serve as an approximation, but cannot predict shared denotations. Finally, due to the combinatorial nature of the lexicon, it is likely that lexical combinations with the same semantics represent an exception rather than a rule.

The paper discusses two related aspectological topics. First section examines the ‘completive’ — i. e. ‘attainment of the internal limit’ — meaning (together with its counterpart ‘incompletive’, i. e. ‘non-attainment of the internal limit’). Its localization in the semantic structure of the utterance is determined: between aspect proper and actionality proper. Also, ‘completive’ can be included under the semantic scope of an iterative operator. It is argued that ‘completive’ is contained as a fixed component in the semantics of some Russian Imperfective verbs such as sgorat’ ‘burn (down)’ and pročityvat’ ‘read (through)’. Second section demonstrates practical possibility and the advantages of a single-verb approach to actional classification in Russian, an approach which is not based on the notion of aspectual pairs. Actional properties are ascribed separately to single Perfective and Imperfective verbs on the basis of uniform tests. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated on a pilot sample of Perfective and Imperfective verbs.

В статье обсуждаются два связанных аспектологических сюжета. Во-первых, рассматривается значение ‘комплетив’, т. е. ‘достижение предела’ (а также парное ‘инкомплетив’, т. е. ‘недостижение предела’). Определяется его локализация в семантической структуре высказывания: между собственно аспектом и собственно акциональностью. Также ‘комплетив’ может включаться в сферу действия итеративного оператора. Аргументируется гипотеза о наличии фиксированного компонента ‘комплетив’ в семантике русских глаголов НСВ типа сгорать и прочитывать. Во-вторых, демонстрируется практическая возможность и преимущества «полексемного» — без апелляции к видовым парам — подхода к акциональной классификации в русском языке. Акциональные характеристики приписываются отдельным глаголам совершенного вида (СВ) и несовершенного вида (НСВ) на основании однотипных тестов. Работоспособность метода демонстрируется на тестовой выборке глаголов СВ и НСВ.

The paper is focused on the verbs with the old nasal present stems that have both aoristic forms and nasal imperfects attested in Homer. All contexts were examined in terms of lexical and grammatical semantics, pragmatical features and distribution of usages. The study investigates to what extent the nasal imperfects compete with the corresponding aorists and outlines the patterns of correlation between the preterits. The Himeric data is compared to the attestations in the works of Herodotus, Plato and Apollonius of Rhodes. It is observed that the competition between the forms tends to lower over time and the verbal paradigm is leveled by employing only one type of telic preterite.

Phenomenal contrast arguments (PCAs) are normally employed as arguments showing that a certain mental feature contributes to (the phenomenal character of) experience, that certain contents are represented in experience and that kinds of sui generis phenomenologies such as cognitive phenomenology exist. In this paper we examine a neglected aspect of such arguments, i.e., the kind of mental episodes involved in them, and argue that this happens to be a crucial feature of the arguments. We use linguistic tools to determine the lexical aspect of verbs and verb phrases – the tests for a/telicity and for duration. We then suggest that all PCAs can show is the presence of a generic achievement-like phenomenology, especially in the cognitive domain, which contrasts with the role that PCAs are given in the literature.

Regardless of their co-textual embedding, verbs like leer (to read) and escribir (to write) can be classified into the aktionsart category of activities (or processes), which can subsequently be differentiated into two subcategories: limitable processes,such as leer and escribir, and processes,such as buscar (to look for) and dormir (to sleep). I shall argue explicitly against the common notion that there are some type-shifting rules which permit change from Accomplishments to Activities or vice versa. I will propose that predicates have an inherently telic or atelic nature, which cannot be changed.

Dans ces pages, je propose de m'intéresser au marqueur pour, et plus particulièrement, aux contextes dans lesquels il constitue l'introducteur d'une cause ou d'un but, illustrés respectivement par (1) et , ainsi que (3) et (4), comme en témoignent les gloses (1') à (4') :

The present study, aimed at investigating the determinant(s) of telicity in Persian complex predicates with šodaen 'to become', takes up two objectives: i) To militate against the proposal that šodaen is inherently telic (Karimi-Doostan 1997;, and ii) To argue, based on a new classification of preverbs, for an l-syntactic analysis of aktionsart .

The article discusses how split intransitivity phenomenon is observed in Turkish in terms of aspectual notions such as agentivity and telicity; different grammatical constructions such as impersonal passives and adjectival passives, and derivational morphology. It observes that agentivity is the key factor affecting split intransitivity in Turkish alongside telicity and these determine the unaccusative-unergative distinction of verbs of manner of motion, verbs of emission and reflexive verbs in Turkish. The article proposes that verbs of emission seem to be unaccusative while reflexives behave more like unergatives. Our findings imply that variable behavior of intransitive verbs can be handled under an event structure analysis where different functional heads give theta role to a NP merged in their domain. Thus, there is no need for a lexical derivation or rule for accounting the facts on unaccusativity.

The paper presents a corpus-based study of English aspectual particle verbs. The standard view (Brinton 1985) is that particles mark telicity; a more recent account argues that particles are comparative and/or resultative (Cappelle & Chauvin 2010). However, neither account applies to all particles. Therefore I propose that there are two types of aspectual particles, which differ in aspect-marking. As corpus data show, the two types of particles also differ in other aspectually relevant properties, namely the type of verb root with which particles combine, transitivity and type of direct objects the respective particle verbs license. In particular, particles with a continuative meaning (about, along, around, on) combine with manner verbs rather than result verbs. They form intransitive particle verbs, or else transitive particle verbs with an unaffected direct object. Particles which mark telicity (down, off, out, over, through, up) typically combine with result verb roots. They form particle verbs which are either intransitive or transitive, with either an affected or unaffected direct object.

In this paper, we will study the lexical aspect in Persian deadjectival complex predicates. Hence, we firstly review different kinds of aspect. Then, we will succinctly review three common viewpoints in the study of aspect in Persian complex predicates. According to the first viewpoint, light verbs play the major role in the telicity of the complex verbs; the second considers preverb to be determinant and regards all of the deadjectival complex predicates to be telic; and finally, the third viewpoint, although pointing out to the non-homogeneity of  Persian complex predicates, does not provide us with an explanation behind such inconsistency. It is argued in this paper that approaches based on the scalar structure of the verb, in which the lexical properties of the base adjective is considered to be of great importance, stand in a better position in accounting for the aspectual properties of Persian deadjectival complex predicates.

This paper investigates the actional recategorization of agentive accomplishment-and achievement-predications when interpreted in a temporally distributive manner. Temporal distributivity is present in a verbal predication if it refers to several entities involved in the given situation not simultaneously but sequentially, i.e., one after the other. In this case we have an incremental relation and the complement, interpreted distributively, is a derived and thus a secondary increment. Therefore, the terminative or aterminative actionality of temporally distributive predications is dependent on whether the secondary increment involves a bounded or unbounded quantity. This paper attempts to show that predications with a secondary increment bounded in its extent are hybrid with regard to their actionality, i.e., they can be both terminative and aterminative and thus in Russian permit perfectivization not only by the paired perf. verb but also by the delimitative procedural. The paper is structured as follows. Section 1 explains the connection between terminativity and the category of aspect in Russian on the basis of elementary predications. Section 2 shows how elementary terminative predications (accomplishments and achievements) can be recategorized in respect of actionality by temporal distributivity. Sections 3 and 4 are devoted to the conditions under which predications, recategorized in their actionality with an increment bounded in its extent, permit the use of the ipf. aspect in the so-called processual reading. In particular, section 3 treats the focalized-processual reading of the ipf. aspect, section 4 the durative-processual reading. Section 5 analyzes why and under which conditions predications with a secondary bounded increment can be interpreted as aterminative and thus be perfectivized with a delimitative procedural verb, delimiting the given situation temporally. The last section concludes with a summary. I use the following abbreviations: IMPF.= imperfective verb, PF.= paired perfective verb, PF-DELIM = perfective delimitative procedural verb which results from perfectivizing an imperfective verb which is aterminative by means of the prefix PO-delimiting the situation denoted temporally.

This chapter raises the issue of high and unpredicted variability in the performance of native Russian (Slavic) speakers. Two case studies are discussed where much more categorical contrasts were expected, but experimental findings attested highly variable interpretations. One case study, Slabakova (2004), investigated the interpretation of bare plural and mass objects in perfective sentences. The second case study, Cho and Slabakova (2014), looked at the acceptability of fronted objects when they are Topics or Foci. In both studies, native speaker participants revealed complex patterns of acceptability sensitive to ambiguity permitted by the grammar. A view of the grammar is discussed, Ramchand and Svenonius (2008) which provides an explanation of the variable findings. Implications of this situation with respect to psycholinguistic experiments are considered.

In this paper, a monosemic utterer-centred approach to the analysis of English prepositions is advocated. More accurately, three different uses of the English preposition to, in which this marker participates in the construction of an endpoint, for instance, a result or a consequence, are examined. The hypothesis defended here is that to is the trace of an operation of location between two terms. I will try to highlight the properties of those terms so as to grasp the nature of the operation of location marked by to. To do so, the tools developed in the theoretical setting of the Theory of Enunciative Operations will be referred to.

This paper examines the temporal semantic properties of English phrasal verbs with the particles down, off and up in the progressive aspect. The analysis includes testing of telicity, dynamicity and stativity components of meaning. The paper also enquires the influence of verb arguments on the change of aktionsart category as well as the commonest denotation of particles as they appear in the corpus examples. The results show that phrasal verbs, whose particles add to the meaning of telicity, become neutral towards this parameter when in the progressive.

Whether predicates describe events as inherently bounded (telic) or unbounded (atelic) is usually understood to be an emergent property that depends on several factors; few, if any, spoken languages have dedicated morphology to mark the distinction. It is thus surprising that sign languages have been proposed to have dedicated morphology for telicity, and moreover that it takes a form which iconically reflects the underlying event structure-this is known as the "Event Visibility Hypothesis" (EVH) (Wilbur 2008). The EVH has been extended with claims about its universality in sign languages (Wilbur 2008; Malaia & Wilbur 2012), its gradient nature (Kuhn 2017), and its iconic transparency (Strickland et al. 2015). However, in this paper we argue that the status of this relationship between form and meaning remains an open question due to (a) lack of independent tests for telicity, (b) lack of lexical coverage, (c) lack of demonstration that formal expressions of telicity are morphological in nature, rather than a lexical property, and (d) inability to sufficiently dissociate telicity and perfectivity. We present new data coming from verbs that alternate in both form and meaning in ASL that is in line with the EVH, and conclude that while there is evidence supporting a morphological marker, the proposed form and telicity are not isomorphic in their distribution, significantly limiting the "visibility" of the event structure. We further propose that much of the related iconicity is the result of several independent factors also found in spoken languages, so that sign languages may be more similar to spoken languages than typically implied in this domain.

Resumen La alternancia ser/estar ha inspirado numerosos estudios y, consecuentemente, una significativa variedad de conceptos técnicos. Ante este panorama, proponemos avanzar hacia un refinamiento de los parámetros aspectuales empleados, con énfasis en los niveles lingüísticos en los que se originan y en la diferenciación entre semántica léxica/construccional. A partir de diagnósticos específicos, proponemos: primero, que ser y estar se alejan de la noción estándar de cópula y verbo estativo y son cuanto menos ambiguas respecto al tipo eventivo de las construcciones que articulan; segundo, que propiedades asignadas en la literatura no responden a la cópula, sino a la construcción; tercero, que la delimitación [boundedness] capta más eficientemente las situación de ser/estar, como propiedad semántica diferente y lógicamente distinguible de la perfectividad y telicidad. Palabras Clave: Telicidad – Delimitación – Cópula – Estado Abstract Spanish copulas have inspired a vast amount of studies involving a significant number of technical concepts in their description. Against this background, we concentrate on the need to refine the technical parameters used, focusing on the linguistic domains where they are encoded and on the distinction between lexical and constructional semantics. Building on specific tests, we propose that ser and estar: (i) depart from both the standard notion of copula (semantically trivial verb) and of stative verb (lacking temporal structure) and are at least ambiguous as for the eventive type of construction they render; (ii) that many properties observed in the literature do not actually ensue from to the copula per se, but rather from the construction they head; (iii) and that the parameter boundedness best captures their situation, as long as it is conceived as a different semantic property, logically distinguishable from perfectivity telicity.

Attempts to account for the Finnish partitive-accusative direct object distinction (PA distinction) based on a single semantic generalization either make false predictions or are stated in vague terms. I take a more focused approach to the PA distinction, restricting my analysis to verbs entailing potential for change (PFC) (Beavers 2011) in their themes. To account for the PA distinction among these predicates, I develop the notion of standard change—in essence, context-sensitive quantized change—and argue that a direct object’s case does not simply follow from lexical entailments but in fact has truth-conditional
force. In particular, I argue that accusative case-marking on the direct object of a PFC predicate contributes the entailment that the theme of the event described undergoes standard change, whereas partitive case-marking bears no such entailment.

Sign language users recruit physical properties
of visual motion to convey linguistic information. Research
on American Sign Language (ASL) indicates that signers
systematically use kinematic features (e.g., velocity,
deceleration) of dominant hand motion for distinguishing
specific semantic properties of verb classes in production
(Malaia & Wilbur, 2012a) and process these distinctions as
part of the phonological structure of these verb classes in
comprehension (Malaia, Ranaweera, Wilbur, & Talavage,
2012). These studies are driven by the event visibility
hypothesis by Wilbur (2003), who proposed that such use
of kinematic features should be universal to sign language
(SL) by the grammaticalization of physics and geometry for
linguistic purposes. In a priormotion capture study, Malaia and
Wilbur (2012a) lent support for the event visibility hypothesis
in ASL, but there has not been quantitative data from other
SLs to test the generalization to other languages.
Method: The authors investigated the kinematic parameters of
predicates in Croatian Sign Language (Hrvatskom Znakovnom
Jeziku [HZJ]).
Results: Kinematic features of verb signs were affected both
by event structure of the predicate (semantics) and phrase
position within the sentence (prosody).
Conclusion: The data demonstrate that kinematic features of
motion inHZJ verb signs are recruited to conveymorphological
and prosodic information. This is the first crosslinguistic motion
capture confirmation that specific kinematic properties of
articulator motion are grammaticalized in other SLs to express
linguistic features.

Spanish copulas have inspired a vast amount of studies involving a significant number of technical concepts in their description. Against this background, we concentrate on the need to refine the technical parameters used, focusing on the linguistic domains where they are encoded and on the distinction between lexical and constructional semantics. Building on specific tests, we propose that ser and estar: (i) depart from both the standard notion of copula (semantically trivial verb) and of stative verb (lacking temporal structure) and are at least ambiguous as for the eventive type of construction they render; (ii) that many properties observed in the literature do not actually ensue from to the copula per se, but rather from the construction they head; (iii) and that the parameter boundedness best captures their situation, as long as it is conceived as a different semantic property, logically distinguishable from perfectivity telicity.