Vendler’s Classification of Situations, and the Problem of Its Interpretation

Abstract

Studies on aspect in English and many other languages in the last two decades have drawn heavily upon a classification of verbs and phrases which sprang up between the 1940s and 1960s in the writings of three scholars (Ryle 1949; Vendler 1957; Kenny 1963). In his article on verbal aspect in French, Garey (1957) also addressed many of the issues associated with the classification — which dealt mainly with the meanings of verbs and verb phrases in conjunction with their behaviour towards adverbials of time and the Progressive. As already seen in the discussion of Voroncova’s and Ivanova’s works, the idea of grouping verbs in English according to their aspectual characteristics had been hanging in the air for a long time, and was also tackled by non-native linguists. The origin of the idea could even be dated much further back, to the Old Greeks. Aristotle noticed that some verbs contained in their meaning a goal or result of the action denoted while other verbs did not. Today it is usually Vendler’s classification that is considered to be the best one, and, in studies of aspect and similar problems, it is his name that is most often associated with classifying verbs and verb phrases according to their aspectual properties. The Curious thing in that the three scholars, Ryle, Vendler and Kenny, were primarily interested in the philosophical implications of the language data they explored, and the importance of their work for linguistics and aspectology in particular came to be properly understood many years later.KeywordsSlavic LanguageLexical MeaningBare NounPlural SubjectSimple Past TenseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.