Telic Events Research Articles

Latin Verbal Prefix ex- in Regard to Aspect

This paper investigates the role of the verbal prefix ex- as a component in Latin aspect. The author provides definitions of “aspect”, “Aktionsart” and “situation type”, and particularly sets light to the term “telicity”, distinguishing between the “inherent telicity” and “maximal telicity”. Based on a meticulous examination of all occurrences of the indicative imperfect of verbs with the prefix ex- in a comprehensive corpus encompassing well-preserved Latin texts from Plautus to Ovid, the author verifies her hypothesis that the prefix ex- adds the notion of telicity to the verbs, and that the most common interpretation of their imperfects is the iterativity of telic events.

Aspect processing across languages: A visual world eye-tracking study

The study employed a combination of a picture selection task and Visual World eye-tracking to investigate the processing of grammatical aspect (perfective vs. imperfective) in three languages: Russian, Spanish and English. In order to probe into the cognitive representations triggered by the aspectual forms we contrasted visual representations of different temporal portions of telic events—a snapshot of the process stage (ongoing event) and a snapshot of the immediate aftermath of the event/the result state (completed event). In all three languages, the gaze patterns and offline responses revealed a strong preference for representations of ongoing events in the imperfective condition. This confirms that the imperfective forms in all the three languages draw attention to the in-progress portion of a telic event. In the perfective condition, however, we found robust differences. Russian uses verbal prefixes to mark perfective aspect, and our results suggest that perfective telic verbs in Russian strongly highlight the result state of an event. In Spanish, the perfective past tense form (Preterite) also highlights event completion, but to a lesser extent than in Russian—in line with its less restrictive semantics in not requiring an inherent boundary. In contrast to Russian and Spanish, English speakers did not show a preference for representations of completed events in the perfective (Simple Past) condition. This suggests that the English Simple Past form does not encode a preferential cognitive salience for either the activity portion of an event or its result state, and lends support to the analysis of the English Simple Past as a non-aspectual tense form.

Actionality and the degree of temporal dynamics

Abstract The interaction of lexical actionality with grammatical aspect is explained in a comprehensive system, based on the “degree of temporal dynamics” of simple and complex actional classes and of the various functions, expressed by aspect grammemes (extended ILA model, focus aspect). Then a new conceptualization of less frequent aspect phenomena is presented. A novelty is the differentiation of focus aspect from status aspect, characterized by habitualization and the transformation of telic events into atelic activities. Argument structures are claimed to be responsible for class changes, especially with respect to the incorporative (INCO) class, combining activity, telicity and a subsequent state.

A Corpus-Based Study on the Pragmatic Use of the ba Construction in Early Childhood Mandarin Chinese.

This article reports on an inquiry that investigated the development of ba constructions in early childhood Mandarin. All cases of ba construction were extracted from the Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus collected from 168 preschoolers aged 2;6, 3;6, 4;6, and 5;6 (year; month; Li and Tse, 2011). Early Childhood Mandarin Corpus, University of Hong Kong. Data analysis indicated that: (1) Mandarin-speaking children produced a repertoire of 11 types of ba construction, and the children in the youngest age group (age 2;6) were able to produce six types of them; (2) children at 4 years old (age 4;6) experienced a critical developmental period of pragmatic use, and at 5 years old (age 5;6) they had attained cognitive and linguistic maturity in understanding the semantic and syntactic features of ba constructions; and (3) there was a significant age effect on the production of three types of ba construction, but no significant association between the children’s gender and their production of ba constructions. These findings offer fresh insights into understanding Chinese children’s innate capacity to understand the co-occurrence constraints concerning the syntactic, semantic and verb features inherent in ba construction, and their developmental ability to denote telic events by resorting to the appropriate ba sentence patterns.

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

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.

La enseñanza de los tiempos verbales en la escuela secundaria: el caso de la oposición pretérito perfecto simple versus pretérito imperfecto

<p>En el marco del Enfoque Cognitivo Prototípico (Langacker, 1987, 1991; Lakoff, 1987; Hopper, 1988, entre otros), que parte del presupuesto de que la Sintaxis está motivada por la Semántica y la Pragmática, y por tanto, emerge del discurso, en el presente trabajo se proponen actividades para enseñar la oposición PPS-PI en la escuela secundaria. Partimos de los resultados obtenidos en un trabajo anterior, donde demostramos la hipótesis de que en la oposición pretérito perfecto simple (PPS)-pretérito imperfecto (PI), cada tiempo verbal tiene un conjunto de atributos semánticos que lo definen, dependiendo del contexto de uso y del objetivo comunicativo de los hablantes. Dichos atributos no sólo se relacionan con el aspecto verbal sino también con la función discursiva que cada tiempo cumple en un texto determinado. Para comprobar la hipótesis, conformamos un corpus de textos narrativos en los que analizamos cuantitativa y cualitativa-mente los usos de PPS y PI. El análisis de los datos reveló que el prototipo de PPS reúne los atributos de “evento concluido” y “evento puntual”; mientras que el prototipo del PI reúne, principalmente, el atributo de “descripción”. Con estos resultados, elaboramos una propuesta de enseñanza de la oposición PPS-PI para primer año de la escuela secundaria en la ciudad de Buenos Aires.</p>

On semantic underspecification in English and Mandarin ‘BEFORE/AFTER’+NEC constructions

This paper presents an underspecification account of type mismatch in English and Mandarin Chinese ‘BEFORE/AFTER’+non-event-complement (NEC) constructions, with a view to uncovering the mechanisms underlying the semantic well-formedness of type mismatch in surface structure. As this construction is used to locate an event on the time axis, it requires a point of time complement. The study finds that when the complement slot, which is typically filled by a telic event or a time phrase, is filled by NECs (artifact nouns, proper nouns, kin terms, pronominals or number-classifiers), the construction will coerce the NECs into telic events from which a point in time could be derived; and in that meaning enrichment process, the NECs are semantically underspecified. The research suggests that type coercion does not solely operate at the level of lexical semantics in that many cases of type coercion are more conventionalized and more contextualized than lexical. Therefore, other factors such as world knowledge, linguistic context and conventionality have to be taken into consideration in order to get an adequate account of the phenomenon. Based on the mechanisms uncovered, the paper makes a formal description of the syntactic process in which type coercion works, and builds a usage-based hierarchy of proneness to type coercion for English and Mandarin NECs.

TELISITAS VERBA MAJEMUK –KOMU (―込む) PADA BAHASA JEPANG

A telic event refers to an event with an endpoint whereas an atelic event is one that has no endpoint from compound verb of V1+komu. This research aimed to identify telicity or the existence of endpoint of compound verb of V1+komu. Related to its telicity, compound verb of V1+komu consists of two; thematic compound verb and aspectual compound verb. Thematic V1+komu compound verb is one that its telicity is defined by komu verb that adds its objective meaning toward V1, giving telic meaning to V1+komu compound verb. On the other hand, aspectual V1+komu is an atelic compound verb as komu verb as V2 does not add any aspectual meaning

Verbal Aspect and the Greek Future: ἕξω and σχήσω

The verb ἔχω has two future formations, ἕξω and σχήσω. Opinion is divided, however, as to whether there is any semantic difference between them. In the view of some, ἕξω shows imperfective aspect (‘will have, keep’), σχήσω perfective aspect (‘will hold back, prevent’). Others deny that any such aspectual distinction can be drawn, pointing to passages where the supposedly aoristic σχήσω is clearly durative. Examination of the evidence from seven authors reveals that, despite the decline of the (-)σχησ- future, the two forms are nearly always used in distinct ways, which can often be characterized as aspectual. First, the (-)σχησ- future is used more often of telic events. Second, it is preferred when the verb has the meaning ‘prevent’, especially when it has a prepositional prefix; as this sense shows higher transitivity than the ‘have’ semantics of the (-)ἑξ- future, it is reasonable to associate it with the perfective aspect.

Vyrazhenije evidentsial’nosti v severnyh ­dialektah hantyjskogo jazyka [The Expresssion of Evidentiality in Northern Khanty Dialects

The aim of this article is to discuss the functioning of the comparison clitic -džyk in forming the verbal augmentative or intensifying grade and its relation to the inherent properties of the event it modifies in literary Komi. The analysis of an assessment questionnaire proved telicity to be the most prominent factor in determining the gradability of an event. Two semantic types of gradation appeared — degree gradation and extent gradation. In the case of degree gradation (’faster’, ’better’, ’stronger’), telicity determines the openness of the event’s scale. In the case of extent gradation (’more’ or temporal duration), atelic events appear with either a cardinality reading or a temporal duration reading, while telic events appear with a cardinality reading only.

Lexical Aspect and the Use of Simple Past Tense by Thai Learners of English

This cross-sectional study investigated the use of the simple past tense form by twenty Thai learners of English at two levels of proficiency. A cloze test developed by Ayoun and Salaberry (2008) was adopted. The findings showed that the learners in the high proficiency group used the past tense form more accurately than the learners in the low proficiency group. When verbs were categorized according to lexical aspect, both groups of learners were found to use the simple past tense form most often with telic events as well as with states. This did not correspond to the prediction of the Aspect Hypothesis, which asserts that low-level learners tend to use the simple past tense form with telic events first. The distributional bias in the input could account for the pattern found in this study.

The Historical Present of Atelic and Durative Verbs in Greek Tragedy

Abstract Among modern scholars of ancient Greek it is almost universally accepted that the historical present is only used for (telic) events and not for (atelic) states and activities. A survey of the extant complete tragedies shows that this view is untenable: there are passages where static verbs like κεῖμαι ‘lie’ and εὕδω ‘sleep’ are used in the historical present and where the historical present describes a state or activity which is extended in time. On the one hand this shows that punctuality or decisiveness cannot be regarded as the basic function of the historical present; on the other it leads to new interpretations of a number of passages in Greek tragedy.

The Case Differential: Syntagmatic Versus Paradigmatic Case – Its Status In Synchrony And Diachrony

AbstractIn today’s leading discussions on case and its licensing mechanics there is only one approach: thesyntagmatictype of case assignment. In contrast, the present article describes patterns ofparadigmaticcase assignment. Paradigmatic case assignment means that two different m(orphological)‐cases fill one slot licensed for the same theta role, whereas under the strategy of syntagmatic case assignment there is just one case form assigned for one theta property. By paradigmatic case, we mean that the same case‐assigner/licensor may opt for more than one m‐case, depending on a number of factors among which aspect, nominal reference and animacy. Illustrations will be provided from modern languages, mainly Germanic and some Slavic, as well as their older states. See the following case pair (Accvs.Gen) from Middle High German (c.1100)er azdaz brot.accvn tranc dazvo. /eîns wazzers.gendaz er […] vant‘he ate (up) the bread and drank some water that he found‘. While drinking up the water in the bucket is impossible (forbidding telicaustrinken‘out‐drink’), thus justifying the partitive genitiveeîns wazzers,daz brot‘the (piece of) bread’ expressed by the accusative denotes a bounded, telic event (permitting telicaufessen‘up‐eat’). The deeper reason for paradigmatic case is that the alternates encode covert differences of reference and discourse status in languages, or their diachronic states, where the respective functional equivalents (such as (in)definite articles) have not (yet) emerged or are amiss. We argue that such paradigmatic bare case doubling occurs only when the triggering force is an active and powerful aspect system as in Modern Russian and Polish as well as in early states of Germanic (Gothic, Old High German). There are different kinds of paradigmatic case assignment, among which thedifferentialobjectmarking/DOM) in various modern languages. They may be seen as a fossilized trace of this earlier, far more dominant, case‐encoding strategy. In the present discussion we focus on what we label ‘onetheta roletwo barecase forms’ (OTTC).

Where the brain appreciates the final state of an event: The neural correlates of telicity

In this study we investigated whether the human brain distinguishes between telic events that necessarily entail a specified endpoint (e.g., reaching), and atelic events with no delimitation or final state (e.g., chasing). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to explore the patterns of neural response associated with verbs denoting telic and atelic events, and found that the left posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG), an area consistently engaged by verb processing tasks, showed a significantly higher activation for telic compared with atelic verbs. These results provide the first evidence that the human brain appreciates whether events lead to an end or a change of state. Moreover, they provide an explanation for the long-debated question of which verb properties modulate neural activity in the left pMTG, as they indicate that, independently of any other semantic property, verb processing and event knowledge in this area are specifically related to the representation of telicity.

SOBRE A SEMÂNTICA E A PRAGMÁTICA DO PERFECTIVO

Este texto apresenta uma proposta semânticopragmática para dar conta da nossa intuição de que eventos télicos durativos no perfectivo não veiculam semanticamente o alcance do telos, explicando por que ‘João construiu a casa, mas não terminou’ não é uma sentença contraditória. Inicialmente apresentamos a proposta para a semântica do perfectivo feita por Klein (1994), que é lida numa chave segundo a qual os eventos télicos perfectivos acarretam o alcance de seu telos. Mostramos que isso não é empiricamente o caso. Em seguida, analisamos a proposta de solução oferecida por Singh (1998). Argumentamos que sua saída leva a problemas: não há critérios linguísticos para a determinação de eventos graduais, a proposta de ambiguidade leva a uma regressão ao infinito e não capta a nossa intuição. Por fim, apresentamos a nossa proposta que lança mão de uma teoria de implicaturas conversacionais generalizadas (implicatura-I) e uma leitura mais “frouxa” da proposta de Klein, em que o perfectivo é claramente uma noção temporal, e, portanto, indeterminado quanto ao alcance do telos.

Split auxiliary systems: A cross-linguistic perspective (review)

Reviewed by: Split auxiliary systems: A cross-linguistic perspective Annie Zaenen Split auxiliary systems: A cross-linguistic perspective. Ed. by Raúl Aranovich. (Typological studies in language 69.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Pp. 277. ISBN 9789027229816. $173 (Hb). This collection of papers about split auxiliary systems concentrates on the HAVE/BE alternation in Germanic and Romance, but it also contains an account of the use of BE as an irrealis marker in Romanian, a historical study of the HAVE perfect in Greek and Latin, and a couple of papers on other splits, namely particle selection in Korean auxiliary formation and auxiliary selection in Chinese. Perusing the volume, one is immediately struck by how much the outlook on the problem has changed in the thirty years since David Perlmutter (1978) formulated the unaccusativity hypothesis. At that time, the alternation of HAVE and BE as the auxiliary in the perfect tense was seen as a simple diagnostic for a classification of intransitive verbs that could be modeled in rather straightforward syntactic terms. Now the auxiliary split alone is shown to be conditioned by a complex number of semantic factors, and its relation to unaccusativity is not perceived as unproblematic. The choice of auxiliary has proven to be subject to variation within one and the same language, as well as across languages. This volume gives a good overview of the factors proposed as influencing the alternations and the more recent theoretical proposals to cope with the variation. The methodology used is changing from the traditional introspection and small-scale informant work, still the preferred tools of most researchers in this volume, to the use of questionnaires, experiments, and corpus studies. Unfortunately, most of the studies in this volume are not very explicit about the way the data was collected even when some rather extensive data collection must have taken place, so the reader's understanding of the data-analysis methods used remains impressionistic. Some of the papers discuss not only auxiliary selection but also other unaccusativity tests, but I do not go into the details of those discussions in this review. The most ambitious paper is GERALDINE LEGENDRE's 'Optimizing auxiliary selection in Romance'. It proposes an optimality-theoretic account of the auxiliary selection hierarchy (ASH) developed in Sorace 2000. The ASH subdivides the intransitive verbs into seven semantic categories. The closer a verb is to the head of this hierarchy, the more likely it is to select BE. At the tail end of the hierarchy one finds HAVE verbs. Legendre translates the ASH into a number of predicate features: telicity, direction, state, inherent displacement, internal motion, inherent homogeneity, and inherent volitionality. This leads to a subdivision of the ASH change-of-state verbs depending on the values they take for homogeneity, telicity, and direction. Homogeneity is a notion adapted from McClure 1995, and it differs from the notion 'incremental theme' (Dowty 1991) in that it proposes that telic events can be homogeneous. The test for homogeneity is whether one can qualify the event as having happened 'a bit': the fact that one can say 'The apple has rotted a bit' when the apple is rotting shows that 'to rot' is homogeneous whereas 'to die' for instance is not.1 Inherent volitionality is meant to distinguish verbs that refer to volitional processes by virtue of their meaning from verbs that are or are not volitional depending on their argument. Although Legendre makes a valiant effort to establish these categories independently, their vagueness, together with the lack of quality control on the grammaticality/acceptability judgments, remains a weak point of an overall impressive paper. A second substantial paper based on the ASH is 'Auxiliary selection and split intransitivity in Paduan' by MICHELA CENNAMO and ANTONELLA SORACE. This is a mainly descriptive paper based on a corpus of interviews with twenty-four native speakers. It is disappointing that the authors are rather cavalier in presenting the quantitative underpinnings of their extensive study. [End Page 682] They state that their sample included working-class and middle-class speakers as well as different age groups, but no further details about the breakdown are given. Auxiliary selection in Paduan is stable at...

Derived nominals from the nominal perspective

Derived Nominals are considered to be the last stage in the nominalization scale. This scale includes a continuum of structures with both nominal and verbal characteristics, and derived nominals are the most nouny in it. Unlike other intermediate structures derived nominals may be ambiguous between an event reading ( event nominals ) and a result reading ( result nominals ). Pluralization is one of the criteria proposed by Grimshaw (1990) to distinguish between the two: unlike result nominals, event nominals never admit pluralization. However, several recent works have argued that telic/bounded event nominals generally pluralize, unless some structural condition blocks it (Iordachioaia & Soare 2008, Alexiadou et al. 2008). This paper gathers evidence showing that (a)telicity/(un)boundedness alone does not explain the asymmetric behavior of event nominalizations with respect to the possibility to pluralize. In fact, certain telic event nominals are inherently equivalent to mass terms in the nominal domain and never admit pluralization or quantization. Syntactically, it is these derived nominals that lack the ClassP projection in their internal structure. The paper has the following parts. Section 1 places derived nominals within the nominalization scale. Section 2 gathers evidence from the literature showing that, contra Grimshaw (1990), event nominals can generally pluralize across languages. Section 3 introduces the exceptional cases for the current standard view: certain telic event nominals do not pluralize. In section 4 I follow Kamiya (2001) in relating the impossibility of those exceptional cases to pluralize to the inherent mass property of such nominals, and ultimately, to the lack of the nominal functional projection [+count] ClassP. Conclusions are reached in section 5.

Acquisition of English Tense‐Aspect Morphology by Advanced French Instructed Learners

The acquisition of English verbal morphology has been mostly tested as a second language (L2) in English-speaking settings (Bardovi-Harlig, 1992a, 1992b, 1992c, 1998; Bardovi-Harlig & Bergstrom, 1996; Bayley, 1991, 1994), more rarely as a foreign language (e.g., Robison, 1990, 1995), in only one cross-sectional study with native speakers of French in a foreign/L2 setting in Quebec (Collins, 2002), and never with French speakers living in France, who have much less exposure to English than their Francophone counterparts living in Quebec. The present cross-sectional study analyzes data from a group of 21 high school French speakers learning English in France to address two main research questions: (a) Do our learners exhibit nativelike performance in their use of the various past morphological forms across the lexical aspectual classes (e.g., Vendler, 1957/1967)? (b) Does their first language lead French speakers to overuse the English present perfect due to its morphological similarity with the passe compose? Our findings underscore the effect of lexical aspect on the use of past tense markers while highlighting a significant departure from the predicted developmental path of past tense marking: States are marked more consistently than telic events in the narrative task. Possible theoretical and methodological factors that might account for the present findings are discussed.

The present tense with future meaning in the accusative and infinitive construction in Plautus and Terence

AbstractIn the accusative and infinitive construction in Archaic Latin, both present and future tense infinitives can be found if there is future meaning; semantic differences cannot be detected. Various scholars have tried to show that the present infinitive is colloquial here or that the alternation between the two tenses has to do with semantic differences in the governing verbs. However, on closer examination of the data such theories cannot be upheld. In this paper, I shall demonstrate that the present infinitive is restricted to telic events. Moreover, it is particularly frequent if the subjects of the superordinate and subordinate verbs are identical. The present infinitive of the verb ‘to give’ occurs more often than present infinitives of other verbs. Finally, we can observe how such present infinitives become less frequent if we compare Plautus and Terence.1

Events and telicity in classifier predicates: A reanalysis of body part classifier predicates in ASL

This paper is an extension of the analysis of classifier predicates (CL predicates) in ASL in Benedicto and Brentari (2004) in order to account for event structure as well as argument structure, motivated by the specific claim that limb/body part classifiers (BPCL) are unergative predicates with single external arguments. If unergative, with a single external argument, BPCL should not be able to express telic events (events containing natural semantic endpoints) because such events require a quantified or specified (delimited) internal argument, or some entity the event can apply to exhaustively. We show that BPCL can express telic as well as atelic events, indicating a contradiction with their claim that BPCL are unergative. We argue that BPCL do in fact contain internal arguments, realized as a morphemic specification for selected fingers in the handshape of the CL predicate that B&B associate in handling (HCL) and whole entity (w/e CL) CL with an internal argument, although this does not entail telicity. This evidence indicates that BPCL are in fact transitive, as are HCL, with the internal argument representing a body part of the referent external argument. We adopt a sub-event analysis of event structure (Pustejovsky, 1991, 1995) and following the claims of the Event Visibility Hypothesis for ASL (Wilbur, 2004a,b,c, 2005, in press; Schalber, 2004) demonstrate that telic and atelic events in ASL are morphologically and phonologically contrastive, in both CL and non-CL predicates, with the endpoints of telic events overtly marked morphologically. We demonstrate that telic BPCL also show these markings, supporting the claim that these CL predicates are transitive and not unergative. We adapt the syntactic analysis of Benedicto and Brentari to account for telicity following insights from Ramchand (in preparation) and Borer (2005). In addition, we show why the tests provided by Benedicto and Brentari to indicate the presence of an internal argument are not applicable for BPCL. Extensions of this analysis to non-CL predicates and instrument CL (ICL) are also discussed.