If a verb is labelled as an "activity", it amounts to labelling it with a restriction on what aspects it supports, among other things. But I don't think those labels are enough to describe everything about aspect satisfactorily. I don't have the resources for this kind of research and don't have very good examples, but I try my best.KimmoHuovila wrote:I don't see any change in the telicity of the lexeme. Walking is the same activity, regardless of whether you are just walking with no goal or walking to get to the park. 'Walk' becomes telic only by adding a goal to be attained ('to the park'). Thus the telicity resides solely in the phrase outside of lexical semantics.
Do you mean "accomplishment" instead of "achievement"?Stephen Carlson wrote:David Lim wrote:Something seems to be operating a higher level of generality than the lexicon. (Aspectologists might say, well that's because walk etc. and other verbs of mannered motion are activities, and that's what they do with these PPs; and go etc., well, they're achievements and they like to the park but not in the park; and sit, stand, etc., you see, they're states, which like in the park but not to the park.)
If too much of aspectuality is in the lexicon, then these patterns cannot be seen and grammatical rules for their interaction with other words and phrases cannot be predicted or articulated.
I don't see anything wrong with considering such generalizations to actually be descriptive patterns of an underlying lexicon. Each word has its own idiosyncracies which have to be learnt separately, which suggests to me that there is a finer lexical structure to each word. Even English lexicons try to differentiate between lexical meanings, though they often don't do that for aspect, and even if they do they don't use the term "aspect", probably because many native speakers aren't consciously aware of the difference even if they unconsciously choose words with the right lexical meaning.
And what about "headed to the park"? Is "head" an achievement? If it is, what about "headed towards the park" or "headed North"? It seems that we can't just classify verbs into a finite number of categories and expect all words in each category to interact in exactly the same ways, so doesn't it still come down to the lexicon in the end? Perhaps what you mean by "operating at a higher generality" is just what I view as people being able to recognize and apply patterns in the lexicon, and so they can in the same way recognize and memorize exceptions to those patterns. Just like we recognize the pattern that we use "put X in Y" when we put X within the "boundary" of Y but we use "put X on Y" when we put X on the "boundary" (not necessarily the top) of Y, and we don't even need to be conscious of this pattern or spend mental effort to know which kind of "Y" supports which actions; "on a spoon", "in a bowl", "on a plate", "in a dish", "on a table", "on a wall", "in/on a box"... but the lexical restrictions are indeed there.