Vendler’s V classes and inner/outer aspect December 5, 2015
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History
The interest for the verbal aspect goes back to Panini and Aristotle. Usually viewed either a simplified or narrow picture (e.g. only telicity), or one contaminated by different kinds of other semantic components (argument structure, mood, tense). Starting in the 1950’s, there were attempts to isolate the temporal dimension of the verbal meaning. Arsenijević,Gehrke: "Event semantics and adverbial modification" ESSLLI 2009
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Eventualities
Looking at “linguistic” situations we can characterize a general class of eventualities These situations (eventualities) are either events or states (also called statives), with events being subdivided into processes (also called activities ), accomplishments , and achievements . Events are eventualities with temporal structure.
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Types of eventualities ď Ž
Types of eventualities: statives (states) and dynamic situations (activities and processes)
Mary likes Pride and Prejudice. (state) John believes that penguins are mammals. (state) Susan was running. (activity) The Johnsons are building a house. (process) The Johnsons walked home. (process) 4
Processes
Events which include a transition, i.e. some kind of change or feature altering of the event or its participants. Initially, within the original Vendler’s division there were two types of events: accomplishments and achievements. Later on a class of semelfactives was added as a kind of an atelic achievment.
The notion of time and VERB ď Ž
ď Ž
ď Ž
The fact that verbs have tenses indicates that considerations involving the concept of time are relevant to their use. These considerations are not limited merely to the obvious discrimination between past, present, and future; there is another, more subtle dependence on that concept. The use of a verb may also suggest the particular way in which that verb presupposes and involves the notion of time.
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Aspect
an indicator of how an action is viewed – from the inside (inner aspect properties, such as telicity) or from the outside (outer aspect) – as unfolding or as completed. Key words are duration, completion, phases, telicity. I attend lectures. I attended a lecture. I have attended a lecture. I am attending a lecture. I was attending a lecture. 7
Stative verbs ď Ž
Stative verbs: 'have', 'know', 'believe', 'be', 'love‘
*I am believing in Buddha. (progressive) *Believe in Buddha! (imperative) ď Ž
Adjectives are also normally stative. 8
Dynamic verbs ď Ž
Dynamic verbs:
Mary walked. (durative) Mary sneezed. (punctual, semelfactive) Mary coughed all the time. (punctual with iterative interpretation) 9
Processes (transitions)
Water evaporated. ď Ž Tom baked a cake. (also called resultatives) ď Ž
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The traditional notion of TELICITY
Telos: a point an eventuality must reach to be properly realized, the culmination point (phase transition, termination…). Telic eventualities specify (at least) two components: a change affecting some entity and a stage the affected entity reaches at the end of the change.
Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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Telicity ď Ž
Dynamic events can be telic ('build', 'write') or atelic ('look', 'sleep', 'talk') :
Mary was sleeping. (atelic) Mary was writing a letter. (telic) Mary was building a sand castle.(telic) 12
(Inner) aspect
The internal temporal constituency of a situation.
Situations may lack temporal structure (e.g. adjectival modification, stative eventualities) EVENTS: situations with a temporal structure (Rothstein 1999).
Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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(Outer) aspect ď Ž
Outer aspect: an external temporal relation between an eventuality and some other time.
Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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Grammatical Aspect
Here there is a distinction between perfective aspect, where an entire eventuality is presented without its internal temporal structure, e.g. ‘John built a house’, and imperfective aspect, where the speaker represents internal phases of the eventuality, e.g. John is building a house. 15
ď Ž
Perfective aspect can express termination or completion of an eventuality, while imperfective aspect can express the ongoing nature of an activity.
ď Ž
Grammatical aspect is expressed in systematic ways across languages, depending on the lexical aspect of the eventuality. 16
Perfective Aspect ď Ž
In English, perfective aspect is signaled by verbal tense and aspect morphemes.
ď Ž
Termination is expressed in activities, completion is expressed in accomplishments and achievements, and statives can either express termination or not (English, e.g. I have lived in Paris).
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Imperfective Aspect ď Ž
The imperfective aspect is signaled in English by the progressive morpheme -ing.
ď Ž
It occurs in activities, accomplishments, and achievements.
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The classification of verbs does not suffice to classify situations. Atelic verb 'run‘, for example, can be used in a resultative construction:
Mary was running in the school charity event.
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Some why’s: (1) a. Right now, I’m reading a book. b. Right now, I know the answer. (2) a. I stopped writing. I’ll finish it tomorrow. b. I stopped loving X. *I’ll finish it tomorrow. c. *I stopped reaching the top of the mountain. *I’ll finish it tomorrow. (3) If I was standing and reading a book, you know I stood, but not if I read the book. Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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1957: Vendler’s classes and LEXICAL ASPECT
Properties of the temporal structure of VPs (not lexical verbs!) – come before tense.
Also referred to as LEXICAL ASPECT
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ď Ž
ď Ž
The distinctions Vendler draws and subsequently illustrates with a variety of natural language verb usage examples, are based on solid arguments. His work has stimulated research that has been applied across many languages (valid in a cross-linguistic perspective). 22
Vendler’s classes
States (static situations) Mary loves/owns/knows a Thai restaurant. Activities (dynamic unbounded): Peter sang/swam/pushed a cart. 23
Vendler’s classes
Accomplishments Mary sang a song/built a house/swam to the island/pushed a cart to the shop.
Achievements Mary touched the lamp/reached the top/found her purse/arrived at noon. 24
Semelfactives Mary blinked/coughed/sneezed etc.
Examples: telic eventualities
Peter made a sand castle. Mary heated the water to 500C, and continued to heat it. (treshold telicity)
Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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Examples: atelic eventualities
The excavated artifact resembled a dragon. (state) Peter owns a rare book. (state) John played the piano. (activity) Water poured from the tap. (activity)
Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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Minimal ingredients: Atelic eventualities:
an entity, Its property
Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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Minimal ingredients: Telic eventualities: an entity, its property a change in this property
Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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Activities
Verbs which describe activities like running, working, etc., express actions that ‘consist of successive phases following each other in time.’
As a result, it is natural to express these events by means of a ‘continuous tense’, i.e. a verb in the progressive form (John is running).
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The meaning of activities
Activities (associated with verbs like walk, run, etc.) differ from other eventualities in that if an activity p (like John’s walking) occurs in period t, a part of the activity (also an activity) must occur for most subintervals of t.
Note that here the subinterval property must be constrained so as to allow for gaps. For example, in contrast to Vendler’s argument about running, one may (frequently) pause while running.
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ď Ž
Also, only parts of the activity down to a particular grain size count as the same activity; clearly, lifting a leg is not running.
ď Ž
Thus, X Vs for an hour, where V is a activity, entails X Vs for all/most times in that hour; also X is Ving entails that X has Ved, since the latter sentence is true of a subactivity of V. 32
Activity tests ď Ž
Some of the standard tests are:
1. Activities take temporal adverbials with for (e.g. John ran for an hour). 2. Activities do not take temporal adverbial phrases with in (e.g. *John ran in an hour). 33
States
By contrast, states do not involve successive phases, as a result, they sound odd in the progressive form, e.g. *John is knowing (the oddness indicated here with an asterisk).
Vendler also observes that ‘while running or pushing a cart has no set terminal point, running a mile and drawing a circle do have a ‘‘climax’’.’ 34
The meaning of statives
Statives either denote a situation or entry into the situation (ingressive or inceptive readings, respectively). ‘John knows’ describes a state, whereas ‘John realizes’ describes entry into a state; hence John is (gradually) realizing what’s happening is acceptable, but *John is knowing what ’s happening is odd. 35
Stativity tests ď Ž
Some of the standard linguistic tests for stative readings are as follows:
1. Sentences describing statives are, as Vendler points out, odd when they occur in the progressive (*John is knowing Bill). 2. Statives are odd in imperatives (*Know the answer). 3. Statives can’t be used in pseudo-clefts with do (*What John did was know the answer).
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Accomplishments
Vendler points out that a man who stops running did run, while a man who stops running a mile didn’t run a mile. He argues that running for half an hour involves running for every subperiod within that half hour, whereas having run a mile in four minutes precludes having run a mile in any subperiod. Thus activities are distinguished from a further class of events that culminate, called accomplishments.
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Activities allow adverbials with ‘for’ but sound odd with ‘in’, as in pushing a cart for/*in half an hour.
Accomplishments have the opposite behavior, e.g. draw a circle in/?for twenty seconds. 38
The meaning of accomplishments
Accomplishments (associated with verbs like build, cook, book, etc.) are eventualities which can culminate. Unlike activities, X Vs for an hour, where V is an accomplishment, does not entail X Vs for all times in that hour; likewise X is Ving does not entail that X has Ved. Thus, ‘John is cooking dinner’ does not entail ‘John has cooked dinner’. 39
Accomplishment tests
Standard tests are:
1. Accomplishments take temporal adverbial phrases with in (e.g. John booked a flight in an hour). 2. Accomplishment verbs with ‘stop’ indicate that the event did not succeed, e.g. John stopped building a house (compare with activities, where they indicate the event succeeded e.g. John stopped running). 40
Achievements
Vendler then goes on to distinguish the class of achievements, namely events like reaching a hilltop or winning a race that can be predicated for single moments of time.
Since achievements don’t extend over time,they can’t in general co-occur with ‘for’ adverbials. 41
The meaning of achievemnts ď Ž
Achievements (associated with verbs like win, find, reach, etc.) are instantaneous (or short-duration) accomplishments, namely events that finish and that occur in a very short time period.
ď Ž
Achievmnets are also telic events.
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Achievment tests The standard tests are: 1. Achievements cannot be modified by temporal foradverbials. Thus, *X Vs for an hour, where V is an achievement verb. For example, *John dies for an hour, *John wins for an hour, *John reached New York for an hour. In cases where these sentences are acceptable, they tend to have readings which refer to the duration of the result state (e.g. of being dead or a winner) rather than the duration of the achievement event itself. 2. Achievement verbs do not take stop as an event modifier (e.g. *John stopped reaching New York). ď Ž
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Semelfactives revisited
Finally, there are also instantaneous activities, called semelfactives, like ‘knock’ or ‘cough’, which are instantaneous, atelic, and dynamic. However, they are frequently not broken out as a separate class.
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The basic situation types overview 1. States: desire, want, love, hate, know, believe 2. Activities (unbounded processes) run, walk, swim, push a cart, drive a car. 3. Accomplishments (bounded processes) run a mile, walk home, draw a triangle, paint a portrait, grow up, deliver a speech, recover from an illness 4. Semelfactives (instantaneous atelic events) blink an eye, knock on the door, shoot a gun, bang a door, sneeze 5. Achievements (point events; instantaneous change of state with an outcome of a new state.) recognize a person, reach the top, win the race, spot someone, the end or start of something 45
Feature list Situations Static States [+] Example: “She despised her teacher”
Durative [+]
Telic #
Activity [-] Example: “I swam in the pool this morning”
[+]
[-]
Accomplishment [-] Example: “I built a house last summer.”
[+]
[+]
Semelfactive [-] [-] Example: “I had to blink when I looked up at the sun.”
[-]
Achievement [-] [-] [+] Example: “I recognized the movie star even though she wore sunglasses.”
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Tests and telicity ď Ž
The temporal adverbial modification test (thefor/in test): for-modification combines only with atelic, and in-modification only with telic eventualities. Peter ran for 20 minutes/*in 20 minutes. Peter ran to her office in 20 minutes/*for 20 minutes. Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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The conjunction test: ď Ž
The conjunction test: atelic eventualities, but not the telic ones, are ambiguous when modified by a conjunction of two modifiers specifying two adjacent intervals as the reference time: John put a bag into the closet on Friday and on Saturday. (NON-AMBIGUOUS: 2 telic eventualities) Mary ran on Friday and on Saturday. (AMBIGUOUS: 1 or 2 running (atelic) eventualities?) Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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Other tests
Vendler’s “At what time did… ?” (a progressive effect for atelic and a perfect effect for telic), “… by/till…” The almost-test (nearly finished vs. didn’t quite do it), the gradually-test...
Arsenijević, Gehrke (2009)
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Are the following sentences acceptable or not? Give reasons for your choice.
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
The ambassador arrived in Moscow. Henry painted the house for an hour. Henry painted a house in an hour. The ambassador arrived in an hour in Moscow. The ambassador arrived for an hour in Moscow. The ambassador arrived in Moscow for an hour. The ambassador will arrive in an hour. Henry almost painted the house. Henry almost started to paint the house. Henry painted almost all of the house.
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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
Mary pushed the baby-carriage in the park. Mary pushed the baby-carriage to the park. The ambassador is now arriving in Kiev. The ambassador is arriving for five minutes in Kiev. The ambassador is arriving in five minutes in Kiev. The ambassador is arriving in Kiev for five minutes. The ambassador stopped arriving in Kiev. The ambassador stopped arriving in Kiev at 4 p.m. The ambassador finished arriving in Kiev. The ambassador carefully arrived in Kiev. The ambassador arrived in five minutes.
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