Incomplete Events and the "Actionality-as-Polysemy" View (talk, The 3rd Semantics and Pragmatics Workshop, 2020) (original) (raw)
This talk attempts to resolve the imperfective paradox through a formalization of Sergej Tatevosov's (2002, 2016) typological generalizations on actionality. It is suggested that the only proper way to understand the generalizations — here called Actional Independence and Actional Inconsistency — is to follow the "Actionality-as-Polysemy" view. Thereby every verb of an actional class <AI1 ... AIn, AIn+1 ... AIn+m> is polysemous between the meanings: VERB’AI1 ... VERB’AIn ... VERB’AIn+m — or rather, selects for the actional operators that derive the relevant actional interpretations. The Process actional interpretation contains a requirement that the predicate of events denoted by the verb be non-quantized, cumulative (Krifka 1998), and not true at moments (Taylor 1977) (and is derived via the "Pr" operator). The contradiction that arises with result verbs such as "cross" is resolved via recalibration of the verb's meaning forced by the Non-Vacuity Principle (Kamp, Partee 1995). As a result the combination "Pr+cross" denotes a non-quantized, cumulative, not true at moments predicate of "going-across" events. The English Progressive is assumed to have a simple Kleinian (1994) semantics restricted to Processes. The imperfective paradox is thus resolved with no appeal to quantification over worlds.
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