Telicity in Article-less Languages

Abstract

This paper addresses an issue of telicity of an event in article-less languages. Telicity refers to an inherent endpoint of an event expressed by a VP. In a language with an obligatory article such as English, telicity of an event is unambiguously associated with a nominal object DP. By contrast, in an article-less language such as Slavic, telicity of an event is associated, not with a nominal object, but with a verbal morpheme. In previous syntactic approaches, this difference has been accounted for by which element in grammar renders Asp(ect) head to bear [telic] feature: in English it is [quantity] feature of an object DP, while in Slavic it is a verbal morpheme that directly realizes Asp. This paper shows that another set of article-less languages of East Asian, Korean and Mandarin, patterns with Slavic, rather than English. The consequence of this paper supports the view in which the presence or absence of an article is associated with the variation in marking telicity of an event VP via a nominal or verbal means.