States and occurrences
The idea that events have certain inherent aspectual properties goes back to Aristotle. In the twentieth century, the philosopher Zeno Vendler (1957) put forward an influential framework for the study of these properties, claiming that events could be classified into four basic classes: states, activities, accomplishments and achievements. The term for an event’s inherent aspectual classification is Aktionsart (German: ‘action kind’). These classes show significant interaction effects with perfective and imperfective meanings, as we will see below. The four basic Aktionsart classes do not reflect properties of individual verbs: as we will see in a moment, I am drawing is an activity, whereas I am drawing a picture is an accomplishment. A single verb can thus have different Aktionsart proper ties in different contexts.
The most basic Aktionsart distinction is between states and occurrences. States are, unsurprisingly, static; they involve an unchanging situation. Occurrences, by contrast, are dynamic, and involve something happening. States don’t involve anything happening; they just exist or obtain, without any sequence of internal phases. Because of this lack of any internal, dynamic phases, they are associated cross-linguistically with perfective aspect, as can be shown in English, for instance, by the following grammatical properties, both of which distinguish them from occurrences:
States vs. occurrences
• states can’t appear, or can only appear exceptionally, with the progressive (imperfective): *I am/was knowing Greek; *I am understanding what you’re telling me; */?They are liking tomatoes. Occurrences can take the progressive.
• states can take the simple present in reference to the present moment, whereas occurrences can’t: I know Greek (= I know Greek now); *I teach the class French (≠ I am teaching the class French now)
Another grammatical feature separating states and occurrences is the following:
• states can’t appear in the frame What she did next was______. E.g. *What she did next was like tomatoes/know German/believe in a supreme being.
Not all occurrences are alike. Based on considerations of inherent differences between the events involved, Vendler distinguished three different types of occurrence, achievements, activities and accomplishments.
Achievements are punctual occurrences; this means that they are instantaneous, occurring at a point in time. Examples of achievements would be realizing the truth, buying the paper, dying, recognizing/spotting/ identifying something, losing/finding something, reaching the summit, crossing the border, starting/stopping/resuming something . . . These verbs essentially refer to an instantaneous or near-instantaneous transition between two states: not knowing and knowing the truth; not owning and owning the paper, being alive and being dead, etc. Because the transition is conceptualized as instantaneous, achievements often resist imperfective aspect, as is reflected by their frequent incompatibility with the English progressive:
In addition to their incompatibility with imperfective aspect, achievements in English are distinguished from activities and accomplishments by the following grammatical features:
Achievements vs activities/accomplishments
QUESTION What other achievements can you think of?
Unlike achievements, accomplishments and activities are durative: they occur over a period of time. This means that they can freely appear with imperfective aspect. Accomplishments are bounded or telic (Greek telos ‘goal’): they have an inherent final point beyond which they cannot continue. Delivering a speech is a good example of an accomplishment: this is an event that cannot continue beyond a certain point: the point where the speech is finished. The speaker can make the speech as long as they like, of course, but once they have reached the end of the speech, the action of delivering the speech is obviously over (although the speaker may continue to stay on the podium, answer questions, shuffle their notes, and so on: none of this counts as delivering a speech). Other accomplishments are painting a picture, making a chair, building a house, writing/reading a novel, giving/attending a class, playing a game of chess . . .
Activities differ from accomplishments in being unbounded or atelic: they don’t have any inherent terminal point. Running, walking, swimming, pushing or pulling something, watching and doodling are all examples of activities. These occurrences can continue indefinitely: one can go on running, walking and so on without any limit.
QUESTION Name the following occurrences as activity, accomplishment, or achievement.
They watched the TV.
He found his pen.
She walked to the museum.
You were talking.
I’ll take the bus.
The difference between an activity and an accomplishment (or an achievement) will often be correlated with the presence of other grammatical structures in the clause, in particular, the presence of certain types of direct object or certain types of adverbial modification. Activities, as we’ve seen, are unbounded processes. But they can be transformed into achievements/accomplishments by altering these other grammatical variables. For instance, consider (52):
Reading in (52a) is an activity: it denotes an ongoing process with no inherent temporal boundary. The same is true in (52b): since the clause doesn’t tell us how many books are being read, we assume that the process of reading can continue indefinitely. But if the verb’s object is precisely quantified, as in (52c–d), the verb phrase is an accomplishment: the object serves to identify the end-point of the event. We know that the event will have reached its inherent end-point once one or three books have been finished.
Since mass nouns are not, by definition, precisely quantified, the verb phrases they appear in will typically count as activities:
Fall in (54a) is an activity; it can continue indefinitely (in space, say); fall down, however, imposes an end-point, transforming the event into an achievement.
The difference between activities and accomplishments can also be captured by thinking about how we would describe what is happening within the event itself. Activities like running are homogeneous: they con sist of themselves; the sub-events they are composed of can be described in exactly the same way as the entire activity itself. As Vendler explains ‘If it is true that someone has been running for half an hour, then it must be true that he has been running for every period within that half hour’ (Vendler 1957: 145–146; emphasis added). The activity of pulling something – let’s say, a cart – is similarly homogeneous: it consists of itself; any period within the timeframe of the complete event can also be described as pulling a cart. A donkey that is pulling a cart for half an hour is also pulling a cart during any smaller interval within that half hour.
Unlike activities, accomplishments aren’t homogeneous: they don’t consist of themselves; the sub-events they are composed of cannot themselves be described in the same way as the complete event itself. Unlike running, running a mile is an accomplishment: the addition of the noun phrase a mile imposes an inherent limit on the event, transforming it from an activity to an accomplishment. To take Vendler’s example, if an athlete has run a mile in four minutes, they haven’t run a mile [accomplishment] in any sub-part of that four minutes, even though they have been running [activity] (Vendler 1957: 146). Vendler summarizes the difference between activities and accomplishments as follows:
It appears, then, that running and its kind [activities] go on in time in a homogeneous way; any part of the process is of the same nature as the whole. Not so running a mile or writing a letter [accomplishments]; they also go on in time, but proceed towards a terminus which is logically necessary to their being what they are. Somehow this climax casts its shadow backward, giving a new color to all that went before. (1957: 146)
The principal linguistic test to distinguish activities from accomplishments in English is the following:
Focusing on what is happening inside the event itself gives us a way to think about the difference between the first class, achievements, and the other two. Achievements are usually described as punctual or instantaneous; we followed this description a few paragraphs ago. An alternative, and in fact better way of thinking of achievements is the following, due to Dowty, which we will quote at length:
It is often suggested that accomplishments differ from achievements in that achievements are ‘punctual’ in some sense, whereas accomplishments have duration: dying, an achievement, happens all at once, while building a house, an accomplishment, takes time. However, many events usually classed as achievements do in fact have some duration. [. . . For example,] a physician may [. . .] view dying as a proc ess with multiple stages happening in sequence. [. . .] Rather, I think the distinction as Vendler and others must have intuitively under stood it is something like the following: achievements are those kinesis predicates which are not only typically of shorter duration than accomplishments, but also those which we do not normally understand as entailing a sequence of sub-events, given our usual every-day criteria for identifying the events named by the predicate. Dying, or reaching the finish line, take place, according to every-day criteria, when one state – being alive or being not yet at the finish line – is recognized as being replaced by another: being dead, or being at the finish line, respectively. (Dowty 1986: 42–43)
On Dowty’s view, the difference between accomplishments and achievements is not a contrast between events which do and don’t have duration. The idea of a durationless event is, in any case, paradoxical. Instead, the contrast is between events (accomplishments) which are normally thought of as containing a series of subevents, and those (achievements) which are not. Another way of expressing this distinction, inspired by Bache (1997: 219), would be to say that achievements are events which are ‘conceived of as taking up an absolute minimum of time’.
Bearing in mind how we are now interpreting ‘punctual’, we can diagram the four Aktionsart classes in the following way:
Following Smith (1997), many discussions of aspect now recognize a fifth Aktionsart class, the semelfactives (Latin semel ‘once’; fact- ‘done’). Semelfactives are single-instance events like cough, knock, blink, flap (a wing), etc. They are punctual, since we conceive of them as occupying a bare minimum of time. Somewhat less obviously, Smith classifies them as atelic, since they have no result or outcome (Smith 1997: 29). Atelicity, indeed, is the only feature distinguishing semelfactives from achievements, the class to which these verbs had previously belonged. The feature specifications for semelfactives are therefore
When semelfactives combine with progressive or durative constructions, they take on an iterative interpretation, i.e. one where we understand that several instances of the event took place:
