On the physical modality of English verbs

Abstract

Abstract The crucial difference between the syntactic minimal pair John washes his car in the garage and John‐keeps his car in the garage does not lie in the locatives, but in the physical modality of the two verbs. Three types of physical modality for action verbs are distinguished on the basis of corresponding syntactic behavior: [ + active] (e.g. wash), [ ‐ active] (e.g. keep), and [ + ? active] (e.g. put, hang, sit; verbs which contain in themselves both the [ + active] inceptive motion and the subsequent [‐active] static state of affairs). Two kinds of inceptions are recognized: WEAK INCEPTION is implicit in certain [‐active] verbs (e.g. leave (something) as opposed to keep, which is [‐inceptive]); STRONG INCEPTION gives rise to two types of transmutation of aspectual characters, [+ ? ‐transitive] (e.g. He hung her picture on the cupboard as opposed to Her picture is hanging on the cupboard), which are changes that take place within a single happening of an action. Vendler's concept of inception (as ...