Grammatical ingredients of telicity : Czech degree achievements and their prefixes
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| Year of publication | 2020 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The telicity behavior of degree achievements has been a puzzling problem for many linguists. The most successful and currently standard theory (Kennedy & Levin 2008) treats them as degree expressions based on different types of scales, which in turn influence the resulting telic or atelic interpretation. While it may account for English, this theory does not hold up cross-linguistically. We challenge the scalar theory with new Slavic data and show that verbal prefixes influence the (a)telic interpretation of degree achievements more than their underlying scales do. We hypothesize that the atelic/telic interpretation of the prefixed degree achievements is related to the unbounded/bounded algebraic denotation of the prefixes (following Zwarts 2005 and his theory of prepositional aspect). |
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