Non-culmination and the structure of activities
In the growing body of literature on non-culmination (Koenig & Muansuwan 2000, Bar-el et
al. 2005, Tatevosov & Ivanov 2009, Martin & Schäfer 2012, Altshuler 2013, 2014, Martin
2015, a.o.) one question seems to have attracted less attention than it may deserve: why do
some but not all accomplishment predicates allow for non-culminating interpretations?
Famously, under the episodic non-iterative construal, availability of a non-culminating
reading is constrained by the agentivity of the external argument1:
(1)
*DIl || OKAlIm EkI
mInut ESIk-nE
aC-te.
wind
minute door-ACC
open-PST
Alim
2
‘The wind || Alim spent two minutes opening the door’
.
Agentivity is not the only factor, however. Nom-culminating accomplishments are also
restricted contextually, (2), lexically, (3), and by the properties of the internal argument, (4).
(2)
Scenario 1. The lock in the door is broken. The agent tries to open the door with the key, then applies
a picklock, then uses a crowbar, then tries to disassemble the lock, etc. At some point, he gives up.
*Scenario 2. The door is opened by typing a code that consists of a sequence of numbers, e.g., 1-2-3-55-6-7-8. After typing “5”, the agent stops.
kErIm EkI
mInut ESIk-nE
aC-te.
K.
minute door-ACC
open-PST
2
.
‘Kerim spent two minutes opening the door’
(3)
??
IkE
mInut
kUlmAk kIj-dE.
K.
2
minute
shirt
kErIm
put.on-PST
‘Kerim spent two minutes trying to put on his shirt.’
(4)
kErIm eki
mInut/sEkund
K.
minute/second
?/??
2
abzac /
paragraph
??
OK
roman-ne /
ZEmlA-nE /
???
sentence
word
novel-ACC
OK
mAkalA-nE / OKxat-te /
sUz-nE / *xArEf
symbol
article-ACC
letter-ACC
?
jazu-nu /
note-ACC
uke-te.
read-PST
‘Kerim spent 2 minutes/seconds reading a novel/article/ letter/ note/ paragraph/
sentence/ word/ letter’
The goal of this paper is to explore whether it is possible to account for the patterns in (1)-(4)
relying on the following working hypothesis:
(5)
At the point where “a non-culminating accomplishment” combines with aspectual
operators, it denotes a predicate of activities.
According to (5), perfective non-culminating accomplishments in (1)-(4) are nothing more
than perfective activities, just like ‘John walked for two hours’. To produce a nonculminating reading, an accomplishment eventuality description has to be converted (by
whatever available means) into an activity description. Restrictions that manifest themselves
in (1)-(4) are thus restrictions on this conversion. Infelicity/ungrammaticality we observe in
(3), for example, results from the failure of ‘read a symbol’ and similar predicates to present
themselves as an activity.
We can benefit from studying the above restrictions in two ways. First, we can find out
what aspects of the internal structure of accomplishments favor their reinterpretation as
activities and how exactly. Secondly, we can better understand what it means for an
eventuality description to be a predicate of activities.
1
All examples are from Mishar Tatar, spoken in the Volga region of Central Russia.
I will explore one specific aspect of the meaning of accomplishment predicates, hoping
that restrictions revealed by (1)-(4) may prove to be (at least partly) reducible to it. Assuming,
with the literature on predicate decomposition starting from Dowty 1979, that
accomplishments minimally consist of a process and change of state components, I will focus
on the temporal structure of the former. I will observe that if contextually relevant parts of
this component are arranged by the temporal precedence relation in a unique way, a nonculminating reading is unavailable. For ‘open the door’ on the Scenario 2, contextually
salient subevents making up the process component do show such a unique temporal
arrangement. On the Scenario 1, this is not the case. In (3), a similar unique arrangement
seems to be lexically specified for ‘put on’. In (4), acceptability decreases with the “size” of
the internal argument. This can be naturally attributed to the fact that the smaller the size of
what one reads is, the more difficult it is to come with a partition of an eventuality into
subparts that can be arranged in a non-unique way (see Rothstein 2004: 111-112 for related
observations). The same mechanism may lie behind the unacceptability of NCAs with natural
forces like (1) and other entities incapable of goal-oriented behavior, since workings of
natural forces are not, under normal circumstances, temporally arrangeable in a non-unique
way.
Absence of strict temporal organization thus seems to be a necessary property of activities.
A larger question I will address in this paper, even thought in a rather speculative way, is
whether this also is a sufficient property. Having discussed some evidence pointing towards
the negative answer to this latter question, I will conclude by outlining a possible modal
extension of a temporal analysis.
REFERENCES. Altshuler, D. There is no neutral aspect. In Proceedings of SALT 23, pp. 40-61. Altshuler, D.
2014. A typology of partitive aspectual operators. NLLT32(3): 735–775. Bar-el, L, H. Davis, and
L. Matthewson. 2005. On Non-Culminating Accomplishments. Proceedings of the North Eastern Linguistics
Society 35. Amherst, MA: GLSA. Dowty, D. R. 1979. Word meaning and Montague Grammar. Dordrecht:
Reidel. Koenig, J.-P. and N. Muansuwan. 2001. How to end without ever finishing: Thai semi-perfectivity.
Journal of Semantics 17: 147–184. Martin, F. 2015. Explaining the link between agentivity and nonculminating causation. In Proceedings of SALT, pp. 246–266.Martin, F. & F. Schäfer. 2012. The modality of
‘offer’ and other defeasible causative verbs. In Proceedings of WCCFL 30, pp 248-258. Tatevosov, S. &
M. Ivanov. 2009. Event structure of non-culminating accomplishments. In De Hoop H., Hogeweg L.,
Malchukov A. (eds.) Tense-Aspect-Mood systems cross-linguistically. Dordrecht: Springer, 81-130.