Arche, María J. (2017) Perfective but incomplete accomplishments. In: LEL (Linguistics and English Language) Research Seminar, Tuesday, 28 February 2017, 4.15 pm - 5.30 pm., Ellen Wilkinson Building, room A2.6,Department of Linguistics and English Language at The University of Manchester. (Unpublished)

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Abstract

This talk is about the non-culminating readings that some accomplishments can have even in combination with perfective viewpoint aspect. Despite being in the perfective and retaining the properties of heterogeneous events, some accomplishments do not entail the culmination of the situation, hence positing a puzzle to standard theories on telicity. Although initially identified in a rather small number of languages such as Hindi (Singh 1998), Thai (Koenig & Muansuwan 2000) or Salish (Bar-el et al 2005), some authors (Martin & Shafer 2013, Arche 2014, Demirdache & Martin 2015, a.o.) have recently suggested that such a phenomenon can be at the root of other issues observed in other languages, such as defeasible causative constructions (Martin & Schäfer 2013), the dual compatibility of for-time and in-time with some accomplishments in English or Spanish (Arche 2014). In this talk I contribute to the debate around this issue in a twofold way: by further documenting the phenomenon of nonculminating accomplishments in Spanish and by putting forth an account based on the properties of viewpoint aspect. In particular, I will argue for the existence of a partitive perfective in Spanish, focusing on the correlation of two indicators: the preference in these cases for the overtness of for+time adverbials, which I argue to be partitive and modifiers of the Assertion Time as opposed to the Event Time (categories as in Klein 1994 and Demirdache & Uribe-Etxebarria 2004) and hence leaving event terminus only as a possibility; and the paraphrase of the perfective with the analytical form corresponding to what can be called perfective progressive in Spanish. Perfective progressives can be shown to be different from the typically known progressives, which are imperfective in their semantics. I defend that perfective progressives are the explicit form of a partitive operator which is also associated with perfective semantics, since they refer to an interval of time that is bounded.

Item Type:	Conference or Conference Paper (Speech)
Additional Information:	LEL holds seminars for staff and postgraduates during term-time on occasional Tuesdays (roughly once every other week), from 4.15 to 5.30 pm, followed by a wine reception. The LEL Research Seminars were formerly known as ILLS (Institute for Linguistics and Language Studies) Seminars, until ILLS as an institute was discontinued in 2013. The co-ordinator for 2016-17 is Lauren Fonteyn.
Faculty / School / Research Centre / Research Group:	Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences > School of Humanities & Social Sciences (HSS)
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2017 15:10
URI:	http://gala.gre.ac.uk/id/eprint/16482

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