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Vendler 1967

Vendler’s original work [53] classified verbs into lexical-aspectual classes. He makes the distinction between verbs that have successive phases (e.g., ‘run’, ‘push a cart’, ‘draw a circle’) from ones that do not (e.g., ‘know’, ‘recognize’). Among the successive verbs he distinguishes those that have a climax (e.g., ‘draw a circle’) and those that do not. Within the other set of verbs he distinguishes momentary verbs (e.g., ‘recognize’) from ones that can span over a longer period of time (e.g., ‘know’).

Using these semantic features (+/- ‘phases’, +/- ‘climax’, momentary/interval) he proposes the well-known four-way classification of English verbs into states, ac- tivities, accomplishments and achievements and develops linguistic tests for distin- guishing between these categories, exemplified in (27).

i. know, love

ii. for how long did you . . . ? b. Activities

i. run, push a cart ii. what are you doing? c. Accomplishments

i. draw a circle

ii. how long did it take? d. Achievements

i. recognize, reach the top

ii. at what time (exactly) did you . . . ?

Vendler uses “clear cut examples” (as he puts it) and as already evident in his work there is a significant difference between the verb ’running’, an activity, and the verb phrase ‘running a mile’, an accomplishment. This phenomenon of changing a verb’s semantic class due to additional lexical items in the verb’s environment is known as coercion and drove linguists to explore different solutions for the classi- fication puzzle, some of which we review below.

Dowty 1979

Dowty further examined the Vendlerian four-way classification and in order to deal with the phenomena of ‘lexical ambiguity’ of verbs in different environments Dowty suggests that “Not just verbs but the whole verb phrase should be taken into account” [18, p. 62].

The semantic properties that are used in Dowty’s definition are momentary/interval, telicity and agentive/non-agentive. The momentary/inverval property refers to the portion of time that is needed to evaluate events. While states and achievements can be evaluated in a specific moment, activities and accomplishment require a longer portion of time. Telicity is associated with having an inherent terminal point of the event, and thus achievements and accomplishment are defined as telic events. The agentive/non-agentive property classifies events as ‘voluntary’ vs. ‘being un- der control of a volitional agent’. The addition of agentivity as a semantic property already foreshadows the relevance of the roles of participants in the events to the event classification. However, in Dowty’s account as it stands this feature doesn’t add a further dimension to the classification but just further characterizes existing ones (i.e., activities and accomplishments are more naturally related to agency, as opposed to states and achievements).

Rothstein 2004

Rothstein [44] argues against the view that “it is really VPs that have to be classi- fied”(Dowty 1979). According to her, “Verbs denote sets of events and are classi- fied into lexical classes depending on the properties of the events in their denotation relative to the particular description” [44, p. 4]. According to her, lexical classes are more than generalizations over verb meanings, they manifest themselves as a set of constraints on the way grammar individuates events.

Rothstein [44] claims that features that do not present additional classes in the classification are in fact superfluous. Thus, her four-way classification of events is similar to the previous two however it is based solely on only two aspectual properties; one is the telic distinction which refers to verbs that naturally head VPs with an inherent terminal point, and the other is stages which refers to verbs that can occur in the progressive.

Her resulting classification corresponds to the traditional vendlerian classification, and she assigns them the meaning of, roughly, the following semantic ‘templates’.

(28) a. States i. [−stages],[−telic] ii. λe.P(e) b. Activities i. [+stages],[−telic] ii. λe.(DO(P))(e) c. Achievements i. [−stages],[+telic] ii. λe.(BECOME(P))(e) d. Accomplishments

i. [−stages],[+telic]

ii. λe.∃e1∃e2[e=s(e1∨e2∧(DO(P))(e1)∧Cul(e) =e2]

In addition, she presents semelfactives, verbal predicates that denote single in- stant events. As opposed to [47] she does not assign them a new category but but rather picks them out as the minimal event of activity predicates. Intuitively, since semelfactives can occur in the progressive they also have an activity reading (e.g., ‘jump’, ‘wink’, ‘knock’, etc.). However, not all activities have a semelfactive reading (e.g., ‘run’, ‘walk’). So, verbs that can occur with modifiers such as at time tor twice can be interpreted as semelfactives.

In order to deal with verbs that head verb phrases of different classes she introduces meaning shift. The implementation of this shifting is based on Dowty’s decompo- sitional approach. Suppose a verb admits a default logical template as proposed

in (28). When a verb is used in a non-natural construction, (contra the predic- tions/constraints defined for it, e.g., achievements in the progressive) the default semantic template of the verb is put through the semantic template characterized by the construction, and the event is characterized by the resulting template. The meaning of a derived accomplishments is thus one of an achievement template pushed through an accomplishment template:

λe.∃e₁∃e₂[e=s(e₁∪e₂∧(DO(P))(e₁)∧(BECOME(P))(e₂)∧Cul(e) =e₂]

Van Lambalgen and Hamm (2005)

[52] takes a cognitive oriented approach in identifying the semantic features that underly the event classification, based on the notion of planning.

A plan in this account requires an agent that wants to achieve some goal, and be- lieves that by performing a sequence of actions, he or she will achieve this goal. Thus, the features that underly the classification are precisely the ones that consti- tute a plan:

1. an activity that typically exerts some sort of a force,

2. a changing object or state that is driven by the exertion of a force, 3. a canonical goal which represents the inherent terminal point, 4. the state of having achieved the goal.

Thus, they propose the following six way classification characterized by the fol- lowing quadruples.3

(29) a. States

i. know, love, be happy ii. h−,−,−,+i

b. Activities (strict) i. sit, stand ii. h+,−,−,−i c. Activities (wide)

i. run, push cart ii. h+,+,−,−i d. Achievements

i. begin, notice, reach

3_{The precise formal meaning of the following quadruples will be explicated in chapter 4, how-}

ever for the time being assume they represent presence or absence of listed plan components, i.e.,

ii. h−,−,+,+i e. Accomplishments

i. cross the street ii. h+,+,+,+i f. Points

i. flash, spot, blink ii. h−,−,+,−i

In this account the objects that are being classified are events in the real world (eventualities in their terminology) rather than verbs. Thus, one and the same verb can be used in different verb phrases to describing different kinds of eventualities (e.g., ‘run’ vs. ‘run a mile’) characterized by two different quadruples.

Creason 1995

Creason’s account [10] aims to classify Hebrew verbs attested in the Bible to Ak- tionsart according to their semantic classes. His classification system is based on real world situational semantic properties and is inspired by data on Aktionsart from similar systems in English. Later, he applies it to verbal occurrences in the Hebrew text of the Bible.

Creason defines the following four features which are not fully productive (in the sense that not all of feature combinations are allowed)

• +/−POINTdefines whether the truth value of a sentence can be evaluated in a point in time or not.

• +/−DURATIVE defines the temporal length of the situation: momentary or interval (not applied to states)

• +/−CHANGE indicates the presence or absence of change of one of the participants in the situation (not applied to states)

• +/−TELIC indicates the presence or absence of an inherent terminus or goal (not applied to states)

Thus, he ends up with the following classification (examples adopted from [10, p. 54–55]:

(30) a. States

i. [+POINT,−CHANGE] ii. The fly was on the wall b. Semelfactives

ii. John hit the door c. Atelic achievements

i. (−POINT,−DURATIVE,+CHANGE,−TELIC) ii. Bill noticed the fly

d. Telic achievements

i. (−POINT,−DURATIVE,+CHANGE,+TELIC) ii. Bill arrived

e. Unchanging activities

i. (−POINT,+DURATIVE,−CHANGE,−TELIC) ii. stayed, waited, sit

f. Changing activities

i. (−POINT,+DURATIVE,+CHANGE,−TELIC) ii. “The men shall eat with me at noon” (Genesis 43;16) g. Accomplishments

i. (−POINT,+DURATIVE,+CHANGE,+TELIC)

ii. “She . . . went back to her country” (Kings 10;13)

Clearly, he classifies situational descriptions rather than verbs and thus the ac- complishment example (literally translated ‘walked to her country’) uses the verb ‘walk’ which typically denotes a changing activity.

The differences between Creason’s classification and the one suggested by Vendler are, first, that he distinguishes telic and atelic achievements, and second, that he distinguishes changing from unchanging activities.