Non-Culminating Accomplishments, a typological and theoretical study.

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

So-called "accomplishment predicates" (henceforth, accomplishments) typically describe events in which a verb's object changes, such as "mow the lawn" or "solve a Rubik's Cube". While past-tense accomplishments have traditionally been analysed as entailing the event's completion (Parsons, 1990), it is documented that such an entailment is not always present cross-linguistically. Accomplishments that have this property are called non-culminating accomplishments (NCAs). NCAs are not a novel problem. However, their cross-linguistic properties remain unexplored within the field.There are two contemporary analyses of the semantics of NCAs. Modal views claim they are a product of language-specific 'modal' mechanisms (Beavers & Lee, 2020 - Korean; Nadathur & Filip, 2022 - Hindi) that offset the culminating moment of an event into a set of 'possible worlds'. If the completion is true in a possible world, it is deniable in the actual world. Scalar views (Koenig & Chief, 2008; Martin et al., 2021) claim that accomplishments denote scales comprising gradable properties (e.g., how burned the book is) along which the object (book) shifts over the course of the (burning) event. Scalar views broadly suggest that NCA languages possess a particular requirement that only a partial amount of change is necessary for an accomplishment to be interpreted as complete, instead of a full change in a non-NCA language.However, if the above views were crosslinguistically consistent, we would expect all accomplishment predicates in NCA-capable languages to allow for an NCA variant. However, sentences like "John solved the Rubik's Cube" cannot be an NCA in Mandarin, contrasting to (1). This raises the crucial problem for both views, that there is no principled explanation for empirical counterexamples. Furthermore, if we consider mechanisms to be consistent across languages, we should see cross-linguistically stable patterns in the type of predicate that allow for an NCA interpretation. However, this question of cross-linguistic variation is unexplored.I suggest a hypothesis that unifies modal and scalar approaches. It also begins synthesising the cross-linguistic data. Hypothesis: NCAs are a product of a cross-linguistically consistent modal mechanism that acts on a specific subset of verbs denoting scalar change. For some accomplishment predicates, a full change-of-state is only required in a "possible world". This hypothesis captures the intuition that specific types of accomplishment are more likely to receive an NCA construal across languages, resolving the problems of current views. It also provides the scaffolding for a cross-linguistically uniform modal analysis to start uncovering the root of NCAs. Thus, my research questions are:- To what extent can we find consistent patterns in non-culminating accomplishment (NCA) phenomena across languages?- How can we account for consistencies/differences within a unified theoretical and cross-linguistic model?To evaluate the validity of the hypothesis, we require empirical modelling through fine-grained cross-linguistic data that tracks (in)consistencies between NCA expressions between languages. I will use a fieldwork methodological format (Matthewson, 2004) through data elicitation from seven languages, with around two speakers each (Nauze, 2008). The first year consists of the literature review, data elicitation, and database compilation. The database will be a .CSV format, with language family information coded alongside the semantic variables and native-speaker acceptability judgement scores. This provides the correct qualitative data required to address the question of cross-linguistic (in)consistency. The second year involves further hypothesis testing required for research question two, such as: "does the amount of change consistently affect the level of acceptability for an NCA across languages?". I will write up the thesis in the final year.