Abstract
In the literature on aspect at least eight criteria have been used for distinguishing between Vendlerian activities and accomplishments. This paper submits these criteria to a critical survey. Some of them are found to have exceptions and/or to need revision. It will be shown that in certain contexts two criteria, the telos, a.k.a. set end-point or culmination, and the aspectual adverbial (in an interval) are in conflict in sentences with quantized measure phrases. The paper will argue that the telos has priority; the adverbial is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for telicity, and the predicates in question do not fit neatly into either aspectual class. Additionally, it will be shown that predicates with non-specific DPs (e.g. some/many plums) are somewhat defective accomplishments.
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Notes
- 1.
Similarly Kratzer (2004), Rappaport Hovav (2008) and Filip (2008). Rappaport Hovav mentions a handful of verbs that are limited to accomplishments. Filip draws a distinction between verbs of scalar change, which she calls ‘strictly incremental’, and verbs like laugh, cry, etc., for which she retains the term ‘activity’ verbs. The view that incremental verbs are basically ‘accomplishment’ verbs is defended in Rothstein (2008a, b).
- 2.
Cf, Tenny (1987:190) “There may be at most one delimiting associated with a verb phrase”. For one year is a delimiting phrase. Hence Bill wrote two books for one year would violate this generalization.
- 3.
The sharp distinction drawn in English between activities and accomplishments, as manifested in the fact that accomplishment sentences in the simple past tense entail completion, is not universal. Singh (1998) discusses examples from Hindi and Japanese where this entailment does not always apply. For some speakers of Modern Hebrew the sentence below leaves it open whether the house was completed:
(i)
hem banu et ha-bayit ‘eser šanim
they built OM the house ten years
- 4.
Similarly Rappaport Hovav (2008). For Dowty’s analysis of read a book see his discussion of examples (22) and (23) in the article.
Read can be a punctual verb, as when one absorbs a road sign, perhaps also when a child learns to recognize one letter at a time.
- 5.
What Vendler actually wrote, including the omitted words, is “that he was running, or that he was engaged in running a mile, during any substretch of those four minutes”. This is equivocal. Are the alternatives ‘running’ versus ‘engaged in running a mile’ or did Vendler forget to put a comma after the second occurrence of ‘running’ so that the first alternative would be ‘running a mile’?
- 6.
Kratzer does not consider agentive subjects to be arguments of their verbs.
- 7.
Kratzer later emends (23) to her (8):
[telic] = λRλxλe[R(x,e) & ∃f [measure (f) & ∀x′[x′ ≤ f(x) → ∃e′[e′ ≤ e & R(x′,e′)]]]]
- 8.
The choice between stop and finish might also indicate whether a predicate is thought of as an activity or as an accomplishment. I have found both of the following on the web: I have stopped growing and I have finished growing. The choice of finish seems to imply that the end of the process of growing is preprogrammed.
- 9.
Higginbotham (2004:343) denies that (31b) is telic. He assigns it the analysis
i)
rise (the lake, e) & μfeet = 10 (where μ stands for measure)
According to Depraetere (2007) the sentences in question are atelic and bounded. She attributes the ill-formedness of (35b) to the incompatibility between the progressive, an unbounding operator, and the numerical NP, a bounding operator. Additionally, she suggests that intentionality might be necessary for telicity. A similar suggestion is made by an anonymous reviewer. In Sect. 2.4.3 further examples will be given of progressive sentences that have to be construed telically but that do not involve agents that can be said to have intentions.
- 10.
This point is also made in Zucchi (1999).
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Edit Doron, Peter Hallman, Fred Landman and Susan Rothstein for helpful discussion. Thanks also to Beth Levin, Malka Rappaport Hovav and an anonymous reviewer for comments on an earlier version of the paper.
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Mittwoch, A. (2013). On the Criteria for Distinguishing Accomplishments from Activities, and Two Types of Aspectual Misfits. In: Arsenijević, B., Gehrke, B., Marín, R. (eds) Studies in the Composition and Decomposition of Event Predicates. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 93. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5983-1_2
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