Measure of change: The adjectival core of degree achievements Introduction

Current theories of aspect acknowledge the pervasiveness of verbs of variable telicity, and are designed to account both for why these verbs show such variability and for the complex conditions that give rise to telic and atelic interpretations. Previous work has identified several sets of such verbs, including incremental theme verbs, such as eat and destroy; degree achievements, such as cool and widen; and (a)telic directed motion verbs, such as ascend and descend (see e.g., Declerck 1979; Dowty 1979, 1991; Krifka 1989, 1992; Tenny 1994; Bertinetto and Squartini 1995; Levin and Rappaport Hovav 1995; Jackendoff 1996a; Ramchand 1997; Filip 1999; Hay et al. 1999; Rothstein 2004; Borer 2005b). As the diversity in descriptive labels suggests, most previous work has taken these classes to embody distinct phenomena and to have distinct lexical semantic analyses. We believe that it is possible to provide a unified analysis in which the behavior of all of these verbs stems from a single shared element of their meanings: a function that measures the degree to which an object changes relative to some scalar dimension over the course of an event. We claim that such “measures of change” are based on the more general kinds of measure functions that are lexicalized in many languages by gradable adjectives, and that map an object to a scalar value that represents the degree to which it manifests some gradable property at a time (see Bartsch and Vennemann 1972, 1973; Bierwisch 1989; Kennedy 1999b; Pinon 2005). In this chapter we focus on the analysis of degree achievements, which provide the first step towards this goal. As verbs for the most part derived from gradable adjectives, they most transparently illustrate the semantic components that we claim are involved in determining variable telicity.

We begin this chapter with a detailed examination of variable telicity in degree achievements. We explore both the general role of adjective meaning in the composition of predicates that express changes along a scalar dimension and the specific effects of idiosyncratic features of adjective meaning, in particular the structure of the scale that represents the gradable property measured by the adjective. The set of facts we delineate allows us to evaluate the two major kinds of semantic analyses that have been proposed for degree achievements – what we call the “positive” and “comparative” analyses – and to highlight the strong and weak points of each. We then present our own analysis in terms of measure of change, which represents a synthesis of the best features of the positive and comparative analyses, and show how it explains the semantic behavior of degree achievements. We conclude with a sketch of how the analysis can be extended to an account of variable telicity in the other verb classes mentioned above.

مواضيع ذات صلة

Aspectual composition with degrees Introduction

Capturing (a)telicity

The semantics of scalar change

Scale structure and standard of comparison

Variable telicity in degree achievements - Telicity and structure

Variable telicity in degree achievements - Telicity and vagueness

Adjectives and degree modification conclusion

The status of adjectives – Adjectival scales

The status of adjectives – The presence/absence of a degree variable

The status of adjectives – Stating the Problem

Adjectives and degree modification Summary

French tres: a case study