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The Origins of Telicity

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Events and Grammar

Part of the book series: Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy ((SLAP,volume 70))

Abstract

The distinction between telic and atelic predicates has been described in terms of the algebraic properties of their meaning since the early days of model-theoretic semantics. This perspective was inspired by Aristotle’s discussion of types of actions that do or do not take time to be completed which was taken up and turned into a linguistic discussion of action-denoting predicates by Vendler (1957). The algebraic notion that seemed to be most conducive to express the Aristotelian distinction appeared to be the mereological notion of a part, applied to the time at which these predicates hold: atelic predicates, like push a cart, have the subinterval property, that is, whenever they are true at a time interval, then they are true at any part of that interval; this does not hold for telic predicates, like eat an apple, cf. Bennett & Partee (1972), Taylor (1977), and Dowty (1979)2. Bach (1986) integrated these insights into a semantics based on events.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Linguistics, University of Texas at Austin, USA

    Manfred Krifka

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  1. Manfred Krifka
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Susan Rothstein

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© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht

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Krifka, M. (1998). The Origins of Telicity. In: Rothstein, S. (eds) Events and Grammar. Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3969-4_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3969-4_9

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-0289-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-011-3969-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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