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Change of state expressions involving weak-endstate verbs such as wipe and drink exhibit variation in telicity. The present study is the first to experimentally investigate change of state expressions referred to as adjectival control resultatives (e.g., wipe the table clean) and the corresponding simple transitives (e.g., wipe the table) regarding their telicity readings. Based on their semantic properties, we ask whether German speakers interpret adjectival resultatives as telic and simple transitives as fluctuating between telic and atelic. Following an event-structural approach to telicity, we also seek to contribute to the issue of which event-semantic properties adjectival resultatives and simple transitives share: if it is the adjective that evokes a telic interpretation, then the possible telic interpretation of simple transitives must arise by different means, suggesting a non-uniform construal of telicity. Twenty-one adults participated in a Truth-Value Judgment Task that varied Structure (resultative/transitive) and Event type (complete/incomplete). Generalized mixed effects logistic regression revealed a significant interaction between Event type and Structure. For complete events, acceptance was at ceiling for both structures. For incomplete events, acceptance was significantly lower for resultatives than for simple transitives. These results indicate that in adjectival resultatives telicity is construed semantically – via entailment – and in the corresponding simple transitives via a pragmatic inference, which is not computed very often. We propose that this type of simple transitives designates process events, exactly like their intransitive variant. Resultatives designate a transition event: the adjective and the main verb form a complex predicate; adjectives with closed scales like clean encode the prominent endstate subevent and the verb encodes the process subevent.

Mastering the semantics of gradable adjectives is a complex acquisition task, since their interpretation requires the calculation of a threshold relative to a comparison class. Context plays a role in determining the comparison class in multiple ways; empirical research has focused on non-linguistic cues, such as world knowledge and visual context, and less on linguistic cues, such as the modified head noun. The present study is the first to examine how preschoolers and adults use the taxonomic category encoded by the modified head noun as well as visual cues to interpret relative (big, small) and absolute (clean, dirty) gradable adjectives. Using existing objects from different taxonomic categories (basic-level and superordinate-level), we developed a picture-choice task that allowed us to infer the comparison class and the threshold from participants’ choices. Forty-three children (aged 3 to 5) and 26 adults, all monolingual German-speaking, were tested. Confirming previous research, children, like adults, showed a context-sensitive interpretation of relative but not of absolute gradable adjectives. The taxonomic label was preferred to visual cues in creating the comparison class already by age three; this advantage of linguistic over non-linguistic information was also present in the adults. We explain this finding with the privileged role of information provided by the taxonomic label: the modified head noun encodes the cognitive representation of an object category and the corresponding taxonomic hierarchy. Accordingly, this representation is easily accessible while creating the comparison class, which provides further evidence that language is a powerful tool to modulate our mental computations.