A Preliminary Look at Event Telicity in Classifier Languages with Comparison to English

Abstract

An event denoted by the VP can be either telic having an endpoint or atelic without having an endpoint. In English, a telic event emerges when the quantity of an object of the verb is known, in contrast to an atelic event, which emerges when the quantity of an object of the verb is unknown, e.g., eat three apples vs. eat apples. This paper investigates whether telicity of an event in two classifier languages – Korean and Mandarin – shows a similar pattern to English. Unlike English, an object in these languages is quantified via a numeral classifier, which may predict that a telic event in the classifier languages is associated with a numeral classifier object. Contrary to the prediction, however, this paper reveals that in both classifier languages an event with a numeral classifier object shows no absolute telic interpretation being interpreted as either telic or atelic. Consequently, previous syntactic analysis proposed for the telicity in English cannot account for the facts regarding telicity in these classifier languages.