Verb catalog - lexical aspect

[MAubrey]

Is the bold text still true today? Funk was written in the 1970's.

In a word: "Yes."

But its not as bad as it sounds. Historically, the people who have done the grammar writing have also been the ones who knew the language so incredibly well that their intuitions were rather reliable.

However, the situation today is, well, different.

[RandallButh]

It's part of what makes scaling the hills of fluency so time consuming. But staying in the valleys should not be an option.

[TimNelson]

Hi. Jonathan suggested these as useful lexical attributes to record.

+/- telic
+/- stative
+/- dynamic

Campbell's "Basics of Verbal Aspect in Biblical Greek" makes use of +/-transitive, and then considers punctiliar to be a subset of +transitive, and stative to be a subset of -transitive. On page 59, he even records his own assessment of a few verbs. A quick skim over the link below (on Indo-European verbs) indicates that causative, factitive, and iterative might also be useful categories, if these can be identified in the verbs.

https://web.archive.org/web/20091027090 ... Verbs.html

I'd also like to know which of the attributes are cancellable (as per Campbell), and which aren't. My digging into Hebrew verbal aspect makes me wonder if there's an essive/stative distinction (ie. temporary vs. permanent states: "Bob is being silly" vs. "Bob is silly").

HTH,

[Stephen Carlson]

Transitivity is not really linked to lexical aspect It is definitely not a standard approach to aspectuality and in fact I would say that it is idiosyncratic. In fact, Campbell's proposed method of analysis is the weakest part of the book and should be avoided.

It sort of works for a chunk of cases in that verbs which have objects that are totally affected by the action denoted by the verb tend to be both transitive and telic. Unfortunately, a lot of proposed rules in language sort of works for a chunk of cases only to fall apart in a large remnant of cases. The use of transitivity here has a larger rump of unexplained cases than the alternatives.

[TimNelson]

My brain also suddenly threw up this example. It's basically a study of the lexical aspect of ἐρχομαι vs. ἐισερχομαι. You'll probably want to start on about p. 14 (PDF page 25). She talks about the different markers for telling the difference between the different Vendler classes, including how to tell the difference between accomplishments and achievements. In particular, she claims that her 129 pages prove that ἐρχομαι is an activity, whereas ἐισερχομαι is telic (ie. an accomplishment).

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/ap/10?0::NO:10 ... 1238085936

Hope this helps.

[TimNelson]

Transitivity is not really linked to lexical aspect It is definitely not a standard approach to aspectuality and in fact I would say that it is idiosyncratic. In fact, Campbell's proposed method of analysis is the weakest part of the book and should be avoided.

OK, thanks. I'm still definitely a beginner at this Aspect stuff. I have a note I made for myself for Hebrew that says "Eventives and Transitives tend to overlap a lot, but are not synonymous". I guess I was partly coming at it from the POV that, while I didn't know if it was a lexical aspect, I thought it was a lexical feature which it might be useful to record along with the others, especially if these are being saved in some sort of table where the results can be selected out.

Am I still right in assuming that his idea of cancellable and non-cancellable attributes is good, though?

[Stephen Carlson]

Am I still right in assuming that his idea of cancellable and non-cancellable attributes is good, though?

It's OK for some things, but it doesn't really work in cases of polysemy.

[TimNelson]

Thanks. (I'm assuming polysemy = multiple meanings). So does that mean that for a polysemous word, each meaning would have to have its own lexical attributes?

[Stephen Carlson]

Thanks. (I'm assuming polysemy = multiple meanings). So does that mean that for a polysemous word, each meaning would have to have its own lexical attributes?

Almost but not quite. Polysemy is multiple related meanings. Multiple unrelated meanings is homonymy.

In the case of polysemy, giving each meaning its own attributes ignores/obscures the commonalities among the meanings. Something like a semantic map is one way to represent polysemous relationships.

[TimNelson]

Hmm. What if there were a way of increasing the valence of each attribute, so that rather than being just + or -, there were also a symbol to say something like "it's complex -- see the attached text", and also a way of attaching text to the attributes.