Re: Settle a Bet

 Kala Tunu <kalatunu@...> writes:

> Jim Grossmann <steven@...> wrote:
> >>>
> Help!
> I need to know if "eat" as in "She's eating." is transitive or intransitive.
> <<<
> certainly Padraic gave you the best possible answer as eurolinguistics go. now,
> may i
> suggest that you read Rick Morneau's looooong essay?
> it's a good introduction to why so many langs in the world work beyond
> "transitive" and "intransitive" verbs. IMHO Morneau's only mistake is that he
> doesn't understand why telicity ....
[SNIP]

Speaking of telicity. I am currently reading a book called:
Events as Grammatical Objects: The Converging Perspectives of Lexical Semantics and Syntax
Ed. Carol Tenny & James Pustejovsky

So far, I've understood that in current literature there are four main subtypes
of verbs..or at least, these editors are concentrating on 4 subtyped:

Stative:  "Bill loves Mary"
Statives are verbs with no internal structure or change during the span of time in
which they are true

Actives: "John walked along the river"
Actives are verbs which are ongoing events with internal change and duration, but no
necessary temporal endpoint

These both (or maybe just Actives...not really sure) are termed "Atelic", since they
have no endpoints.

Then there are:

Accomplishments: "He consumed the pineapple"
Accomplishments are events with duration and an obligatory endpoint.

Achievements: "John arrived in Pittsburgh"
Achievements are events which have instantaneous culmination or endpoint and are
necessarily without duration.

These last two are "Telic" meaning they are bounded, or culminating.

This is my limited vew of Telicity....is there any one more skilled who'd like to elucidate?

Elliott Lash