The semantics of degree verbs and the telicity issue

Abstract

This paper addresses the formal representation of Degree Verbs (DVs), also known as degreeachievements. After assessing the similarities and differences of DVs vis-à-vis the accomplishmentpredicates within the set of “incremental theme verbs”, a double scale system is proposed to account for the telicity calculus. It is shown that DVs should be regarded as telic even though in most cases ,they do not imply culmination, but rather the mere attainment of a “contingent” telos. This formalism can be exploited to account for related phenomena, such as the so-called “conative oblique constructions” and “non-culminating” telic predicates

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.