Abstract
The paper discusses the degree gradation of verbs in German by the adverb sehr (very, very much). The main focus of the paper is on the gradation of change of state verbs and the interaction of degree gradation and telicity. It is argued that the gradability of telic change of state verbs supports the distinction between a standard and a maximum telos based on the analysis of Kearns 2007. A maximum telos is identical to a maximal scale value, while a standard telos marks a non-maximal degree. The general assumption is that a telos can be analyzed as a specified standard value. To maintain the analysis, additional data from Russian and French are provided which show that the gradability of change of state verbs depends on the kind of telos of the respective verb.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
For different linguistic realizations of verb gradation e.g., by intonation, cf. Bolinger 1972.
- 2.
In contrast to English very, sehr can be used for degree gradation of adjectives as well as verbs. For differences between sehr as adjectival and sehr as verbal degree modificator cf. Ropertz 2001. In English a general degree adverb like sehr is missing, therefore it is not possible to provide a uniform translation of sehr in the examples throughout this paper.
- 3.
In Sect. 6.8 a distinction between two different types of degree gradation is introduced, depending on the kind of relationship between the gradation scale and the event.
- 4.
One way to express progressive in German is to use a periphrastic construction consisting of sein (to be), am (at, by), which is a contraction of the preposition an and the definite article, and a nominalized infinitive. In the glosses, I mark the single components of the construction and indicate the nominalization of the infinitive by the subscript Nom.
- 5.
For a formal definition of the homomorphic mapping cf. Caudal and Nicolas 2005, 293).
- 6.
- 7.
I am analyzing only perfective uses of change of state verbs, since in case of imperfective aspect the culmination condition is canceled, which alters the truth conditions of the predicate.
- 8.
The examples discussed in this section are taken from dataset collected in the project LO 4545/1 “Verbgraduierung” supported by the German Research Community and conducted by Sebastian Löbner.
- 9.
For an analysis of prefix verbs in German and the effect of prefixes and particles and the semantics of the verbs cf. Stiebels 1996.
- 10.
Throughout the paper I will use the notions relative standard telos and absolute standard telos to differentiate the cases in which standard and maximum telos are distinct (first case) or fall together (second case).
- 11.
The notion of a standard telos could also be used to explicate Borer’s notion of the term sub-culmination point. But such an analysis approximates to the endpoint approach, since the different telos cannot be defined with regard to the notion of homogeneity.
- 12.
It is an open question whether open scale accomplishments that are only related to a standard telos really exist.
- 13.
The examples in (27) are taken from the Russian National Corpus (http://www.ruscorpora.ru/en/index.html).
- 14.
In the Russian examples I have marked the case of the nouns in the glossed to indicate grammatical relations. Following abbreviations are used: Nom = Nominative, Acc = Accusative, Gen = Genitive, Inst = Instrumental and Prep = Prepositional.
- 15.
The examples are taken from the following sources: (28-a) http://cagey.livejournal.com/454951.html (04.08.2010), (28-b) http://turism.pp.ua/tags/%F1%E1%EE%F0/page/2/ (04.08.2010) and (28-c) http://medicinecedole.ru/188.php (04.08.2010).
- 16.
The examples in (32) are taken from a French online corpus (http://www.frantext.fr/).
- 17.
Example (33-a) is taken from http://projetbabel.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7922 (04.08.2010) and (33-b) is from http://www.france24.com/fr/20081125-je-pense-pas-quune-scission-ps-soit-possible-parti-socialiste?quicktabs_1=0 (04.08.2010).
References
Bierwisch, Manfred. 1989. The semantics of gradation. In Dimensional adjectives, eds. Manfred Bierwisch, and Ewald Lang, 71–216. Berlin: Springer.
Bitextina, G.A. 1975. On the use of očen’ and related adverbs. The Slavic and East European Journal 19(2):205–211.
Bolinger, Dwight. 1972. Degree words. The Hague: Mouton.
Borer, Hagit. 2005. Some notes on the syntax of quantity. In Aspectual inquiries, eds. Paula Marie Kempchinsky, and Roumyana Slabakova, 41–68. Berlin: Springer.
Borik, Olga. 2006. Aspect and reference time. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Breindl, Eva. 2009. Intensitätspartikel. In Handbuch der deutschen Wortarten, ed. Ludger Hoffmann, 397–422. Berlin: de Gruyter.
Caudal, Patrick. 2005. Degree scales and aspect. In Crosslinguistic views on tense, aspect and modality. Cahiers Chronos 13, eds. Bart Hollebrandse, Angeliek van Hout, and Co Vet, 103–118. Amsterdam/Paris/New York: Rodopi.
Caudal, Patrick, and Nicolas, David. 2005. Types of degrees and types of event structure. In Event arguments: foundations and applications, eds. Claudia Maienborn, and Angelika Wöllstein, 277–299. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Doetjes, Jenny. 1997. Quantifiers and selection. Dordrecht: Holland Institute of Generative Linguistics.
Doetjes, Jenny. 2008. Adjectives and degree modification. In Adjectives and adverbs, eds. Louise McNally, and Christopher Kennedy, 123–155. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dowty, David. 1979. Word meaning and Montague grammar. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Filip, Hana. 2000. The quantization puzzle. In Events as grammatical objects, eds. Carol Tenny, and James Pustejovsky, 39–93. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Filip, Hana. 2007. Events and maximalization: the case of telicity and perfectivity. In Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect, ed. Susan Rothstein, 217–256. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Forsyth, J. 1970. A grammar of aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gerber, Monika. 1984. Zur Graduierbarkeit russischer Verben. Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Pädagogischen Hochschule Clara Zetkin Leipzig 1:43–46.
Kearns, Kate. 2007. Telic senses of deadjectival verbs. Lingua 117:26–66.
Kennedy, Christopher. 1999. Projecting the adjective. Garland: New York.
Kennedy, Christopher, and Beth Levin. 2008. Measure of change: the adjectival core of degree achievements. In Adjectives and adverbs, eds. Louise McNally, and Christopher Kennedy, 156–182. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kennedy, Christopher, and Louise McNally. 2005. Scale structure, degree modification, and the semantics of gradable predicates. Language 82(2):345–381.
Kirschbaum, Ilja. 2002. Schrecklich nett und voll verrückt - Muster der Adjektiv-Intensivierung im Deutschen. Dissertation Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf.
Krifka, Manfred. 1989. Nominalreferenz und Zeitkonstitution. Zur Semantik von Massentermen, Individualtermen, Aspektklassen. München: Wilhelm Fink.
Krifka, Manfred. 1998. The origins of telicity. In Events and grammar, ed. Rothstein, Susan, 197–235. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Levin, Beth. 1993. English verb classes and alternations. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Löbner, Sebastian. 1986. Quantification as a major modul of natural language semantics. In Studies in discourse representation theory and the theory of generalized quantifiers, eds. Jeroen Groenendijk, Dick de Jeroen, and Martin Stokhof, 53–86. Dordrecht: Foris.
Löbner, Sebastian. 1990. Wahr neben Falsch. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
Löbner, Sebastian. forthcoming. Subcompositionality. In The oxford handbook of compositionality, eds. Wolfram Hinzen, Edouard Machery, and Markus Werning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Löbner, Sebastian. in press. Dual oppositions in lexical meaning. In Semantics: an international handbook of natural language meaning (HSK), eds. Claudia Maienborn, Klaus von Heusinger, and Paul Portner. Berlin/New York: de Gruyter.
Obenauer, Hans-Georg. 1984. On the identification of empty categories. The Linguistic Review 4:153–202.
Partee, Barbara, Alice ter Meulen, and Robert E. Wall. 1990. Mathematical methods in linguistics. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Piñón, Christopher. 2005. Adverbs of completion in an event semantics. In Perspectives on aspect, eds. Henk Verkuyl, Henriette de Swart, and Angeliek van Hout, 146–166. Dordrecht: Springer.
Piñón, Christopher. 2008. Aspectual composition with degrees. In Adjectives and Adverbs, eds. Louise McNally, and Christopher Kennedy, 183–219. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rappaport Hovav, Malka. 2008. Lexicalized meaning and the internal temporal structure of events. In Theoretical and crosslinguistic approaches to the semantics of aspect, ed. Rothstein, Susan, 13–42. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Rappaport Hovav, Malka, and Beth Levin. 2010. Reflection on manner/result complementarity. In Lexical semantics, syntax, and event structure, eds. Malka Rappaport Hovav, Edit Doron, and Ivy Sichel, 21–38. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ropertz, Ruth. 2001. Das wort sehr als Modifikator deutscher Adjektive und Verben. Magisterarbeit Universität Düsseldorf.
Stiebels, Barbara. 1996. Lexikalische argumente and adjunkte. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Tenny, Carol. 1994. Aspectual roles and the syntax-semantics interface. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Tsujimura, Natsuko. 2001. Degree words in Japanese. Lingua 111:29–51.
Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Verbs and times. In Linguistics in philosophy, ed. Zeno Vendler, 97–121. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Acknowledgements
The research for this paper was supported by the German Science Foundation (DGF) grant FOR 600, Research Unit “Functional Concepts and Frames.” I would like to thank Adrian Czardybon, Thomas Gamerschlag, Wilhelm Geuder, Sebastian Löbner, Stefanie Schulze, the participants of the “Workshop on the Subatomic Semantics of Event Predicates” in Barcelona and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and Aurélien Jarry, Anja Latrouite, Nikolaj Skorolupov, Pavel Sirotkin and Anselm Terhalle for their help with the French and Russian data.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fleischhauer, J. (2013). Interaction of Telicity and Degree Gradation in Change of State Verbs. 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_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-5983-1_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-5982-4
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-5983-1
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawSocial Sciences (R0)