INSTANT ACTIONS IN MODERN ENGLISH: ACHIEVEMENTS VS SEMELFACTIVES
Keywords:
aspectuality, telicity, iteration, semelfactive, achievement, accomplishment, activity, stateAbstract
The article focuses on two aspectual classes of predicates: achievements and semelfactives. The approaches to their differentiation are quite controversial. In the history of linguistics semelfactives were treated either as a subclass of achievements or activities. The article argues that they constitute an independent aspectual class. The examples from the British national corpus illustrate and ground the observations made in the course of the analysis. Semelfactives and achievements are defined as telic, stageless events. The telicity of the achievement class lies in their ability to denote an event of change whereas the telicity of semelfactives is explained by their natural atomicity. Since the semelfactive verbs do not denote a change they can be summed into one singular iterative event (S-summing operation). The stages of this event are lexically accessible. This fact differentiates them from the class of activities. A semelfactive verb may denote both an action of single occurrence and a multiplicative action. Light verb constructions, due to the presence of a pronominal modifier, eliminate this ambiguity. An instant action can be expressed by accomplishments and even states depending on the context. The default aspectual class of a predicate changes under the influence of context: an aspectual coercion takes place.
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