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On Non-Culminating Accomplishments
Academic Work
In English, non-progressive sentences containing accomplishment VPs give rise to culmination entailments. For example, (1) entails that the fixing was completed.
(1) I fixed the fence (# but I didn’t finish fixing it).
In this paper we examine the corresponding class of VPs in two Salish langauges: St’át’imcets and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh. We first provide evidence that the closest equivalents to accomplishment VPs in St’át’imcets and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh - ’control transitives’ - do not give rise to culmination entailments. Instead, they have culmination implicatures, which can be cancelled without contradiction.
We then provide an analysis of the Salish data. In both languages, control transitive verbs are derived by suffixation of a transitivizer to a root verb with a single internal argument (Davis 1997, Davis and Demirdache 2000). Unlike control transitives, these underlying root verbs have a culmination entailment which cannot be cancelled. Control transitivizers therefore appear to remove the requirement that culmination happens in the actual world. our analysis of control transitivizers treats them as introducing inertia worlds in the sense of Dowty’s (1977, 1979) analysis of the English progressive.
We close the paper with discussion of the consequences of our analysis for cross-linguistic variation, and for the relationship between culmination properties and temporal duration. We conclude that the Salish data argue against a unified analysis of both ’accomplishments’ and ’achievements’ as primitive aspectual classes in natural language.
In the remainder of this introduction we outline some relevant background assumptions about English accomplishments and about (im)perfectivity in Salish.
(1) I fixed the fence (# but I didn’t finish fixing it).
In this paper we examine the corresponding class of VPs in two Salish langauges: St’át’imcets and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh. We first provide evidence that the closest equivalents to accomplishment VPs in St’át’imcets and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh - ’control transitives’ - do not give rise to culmination entailments. Instead, they have culmination implicatures, which can be cancelled without contradiction.
We then provide an analysis of the Salish data. In both languages, control transitive verbs are derived by suffixation of a transitivizer to a root verb with a single internal argument (Davis 1997, Davis and Demirdache 2000). Unlike control transitives, these underlying root verbs have a culmination entailment which cannot be cancelled. Control transitivizers therefore appear to remove the requirement that culmination happens in the actual world. our analysis of control transitivizers treats them as introducing inertia worlds in the sense of Dowty’s (1977, 1979) analysis of the English progressive.
We close the paper with discussion of the consequences of our analysis for cross-linguistic variation, and for the relationship between culmination properties and temporal duration. We conclude that the Salish data argue against a unified analysis of both ’accomplishments’ and ’achievements’ as primitive aspectual classes in natural language.
In the remainder of this introduction we outline some relevant background assumptions about English accomplishments and about (im)perfectivity in Salish.
Lena Jacobs (Elder)
Margaret Locke (Elder)
Chief Lawrence Baker (Elder)
Tina Cole (Elder)
Yvonne Joseph (Elder)
Eva Lewis (Elder)
Doris White (Elder)
Margaret Locke (Elder)
Chief Lawrence Baker (Elder)
Tina Cole (Elder)
Yvonne Joseph (Elder)
Eva Lewis (Elder)
Doris White (Elder)
AW.00152
2005
Language and Linguistics
Proceedings of the 35th NELS Conference
87-102
87-102
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