Non‐culminating accomplishments

Martin, Fabienne

doi:10.1111/lnc3.12346

Cited by 25 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…never finish Intended: 'The architect built the house … without ever finishing building it.' (Bott and Hamm 2014) [#non-culminating telic use] Similar observations have been made for Spanish (Arche 2014) and English (Kearns 2007;Martin 2019).…”

Section: Telic Versus Atelic Uses Of Accomplishmentssupporting

confidence: 66%

“…break-CTRL-TRZ Literally:'I broke a knife and I'm still breaking it.' (Bar-el 2005) Non-culminating accomplishments have also been identified in a variety of genetically unrelated languages, including Karachay-Balkar (Tatevosov 2008), Mandarin (Chief 2008;Koenig and Chief 2008;Lin 2004;Liu 2018;Zhang 2018 among others), Korean (Park 1993;Beavers and Lee, this issue), Malagasy (Paul et al 2015, this issue), and, more recently, Indonesian (Sato 2020), Bantu languages such as Xhosa (Crane and Persohn 2019;Savić 2017), Samoan and Daakaka (Hopperdietzel 2020); see Martin (2019) for a more exhaustive list of references. Some examples are provided in (5)-(7).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Partitive accomplishments across languages

Martin

Demirdache

2020

Linguistics

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Section: Telic Versus Atelic Uses Of Accomplishmentssupporting

confidence: 66%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partitive accomplishments across languages

Martin

Demirdache

2020

Linguistics

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“…Non-culminating accomplishments are a cross-linguistic phenomenon in which predicates strongly implicate, but do not necessarily entail, culmination when paired with perfective aspect. They are attested in an array of genetically and geographically diverse languages, see Martin (2019). As already seen in (97) above, Southern Ndebele allows for nonculmination readings with the perfective aspect.…”

Section: Studies In Africanmentioning

confidence: 87%

Notes on actionality in two Nguni languages of South Africa

Crane¹,

Persohn

2021

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This paper presents some key findings of studies of actionality and the verbal grammar–lexicon interface in two Nguni Bantu languages of South Africa, Xhosa and Southern Ndebele. We describe interactions between grammatical tense marking (and other sentential bounding elements) and lexical verb types, arguing for the salience of inchoative verbs, which lexically encode a resultant state, and, in particular, a sub-class of inchoative verbs, biphasal verbs, which encode both a resultant state and the “coming-to-be” phase leading up to that state. We further discuss other important features of actional classes in Xhosa and Southern Ndebele, including topics such as the role of participant structure and the relative importance of cross-linguistically prominent distinctions such as that between Vendlerian activities and accomplishments. Although differences between Xhosa and Southern Ndebele are evident both in the behaviour of individual tense-aspect forms and in the interpretive possibilities of specific verbs, the general patterns are quite similar. This similarity suggests that the patterns are likely to extend to other Nguni languages, as well, and that cross-linguistic comparison of particular lexical items across these languages are both feasible and likely to bear fruit.

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“…Non-maximal readings of quantized NPs are a potential source of incomplete event interpretations for incremental theme predicates (Kennedy and Levin 2008;Martin 2019;Piñón 2005Piñón , 2009; let us see why.…”

Section: (4)mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This means that for incremental theme telic verbs like eat the sandwich, the perfective is not the source of felicitous incomplete event interpretations in adult English, since, as we have just seen in the previous section, it is possible to obey the event completion requirement imposed by the perfective and nevertheless get an incomplete event interpretation via the non-maximal reading of the determiner the in the VP eat-the-sandwich. On this point, see the difference between nonculminating vs. non-maximal uses of accomplishments discussed in Demirdache and Martin (this issue) andMartin (2019). 9 Accounting for this variation in the aspectual uses of the simple past is beyond the scope of this paper (but see next footnote).…”

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confidence: 96%

Children’s non-adultlike interpretations of telic predicates across languages

et al. 2020

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The acquisition literature has documented several different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations has not been attempted and a crosslinguistic perspective is lacking. This task is not easy, for, on the surface, children’s non-adultlike interpretations appear to be scattered and even contradictory across languages. Several cognitive biases have been proposed to explain given patterns (children initially adhere to a Manner bias, or alternatively a Result bias). Reviewing a wide range of studies on the acquisition of telic sentences in relation to tense-aspect markers, we show that children’s non-adultlike interpretations fall into three different patterns. We conclude that the diversity of non-adultlike interpretations that is found across child languages is incompatible with accounts that rely on these cognitive, language-independent principles, but instead is triggered by language-specific properties. Analyzing these patterns in detail, it appears that child learners across languages have problems with tense-aspect forms with variable meanings, in contrast to forms with a one-to-one form/meaning mappings which are acquired earlier. While adults use a context-sensitive interpretation of forms with multiple meanings, various semantic-pragmatic sources can explain children’s difficulties with interpreting such forms. All explanations that we identify across child languages rely on children’s immature command of pragmatic reasoning, albeit in very different ways for the three different patterns. Thus, by taking a crosslinguistic semantic approach and integrating detailed insights from the tense-aspect semantics of specific languages with universal pragmatic effects, we explain the non-adultlike interpretation of telic sentences in a variety of child languages in a comprehensive way.

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Non‐culminating accomplishments

Cited by 25 publications

References 68 publications

Partitive accomplishments across languages

Partitive accomplishments across languages

Notes on actionality in two Nguni languages of South Africa

Children’s non-adultlike interpretations of telic predicates across languages

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