The proper treatment of measuring out, telicity, and perhaps even quantification in english

Abstract

The notions of ‘measuring out’ (Tenny 1987, 1992) and ‘incremental theme’ (Dowty 1991) have been widely invoked as aspectual criteria involved in verbal argument selection. However, the full range of relevant data suggests that the role of arguments in determining aspectuality has little to do with argument selection. Rather, the relation between an argument and time found in ‘measuring out’ and ‘incremental theme’ phenomena is more properly viewed as a relation between the dimensional structure of the argument, the time interval, and the event in which they take part. Such a relation, here called structure-preserving binding, arises from an interaction between the lexical structure of the verb and pragmatic factors. This approach extends naturally to other situations in which time is not implicated, for example, covering and filling relations. It also extends to plurals, yielding a novel formalization of distributive quantification.

I am grateful to James Pustejovsky, Joan Maling, Piroska Csuri, and Henk Verkuyl for important discussions on this topic, and to Verkuyl, Manfred Krifka, Carol Tenny, and Fritz Newmeyer for detailed remarks on earlier versions of the paper. This is not to say that they endorse the present version.

This research was supported in part by NSF Grant IRI 92-13849 to Brandeis University, in part by Keck Foundation funding of the Brandeis Center for Complex Systems, and in part by a Fellowship to the author from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.